


Phone Home (Or Don't)

by lowflyingfruit



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Thor (Marvel) is Not Stupid, background canon relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-27 21:01:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 52,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15033245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowflyingfruit/pseuds/lowflyingfruit
Summary: AU: instead of sending the Destroyer after Thor, Loki hides him from Heimdall's sight, stranding him on Earth.It's been a rough week, between the fiasco at Stark Expo, the incident in Harlem, and the strange hammer falling from the sky in New Mexico. And the universe is only getting bigger, the threats more serious. New and stranger battles are coming whether Earth is ready or not.In the aftermath of possible first contact with an alien race, a group of remarkable people slowly assembles, first to learn - and then to fight.





	1. A Man in Custody

**Author's Note:**

> This is what Infinity War does to me. It makes me dig up old fic concepts and rework them. Enjoy some pre-Avengers more-or-less teamfic.

It hadn’t taken long for Clint to work out that there was exactly no decent coffee for sale in Puente Antiguo. There was only bad coffee and worse coffee. He sighed and got himself an energy drink instead. Long night, and a long shift to go. Mostly paperwork. Fury was going to want to know why Clint hadn’t taken that shot.

‘Having too much fun watching’ probably wasn’t going to cut it.

It had been pretty good fun, though. Their intruder had been extremely courteous about his break-in, as far as breaking in went. Targeted the weakest boundary, smashed his way through to his objective, didn’t do any harm worse than a broken bone or two. The bit where he’d stopped at the hammer was kind of puzzling, but hey, they had him in custody now. They’d find out.

He passed Phil - who apparently had worked a double. He was showing it a little. His tie was ever so slightly creased. By Phil’s standards that was practically _dishabille_. “Barton,” Coulson greeted him.

“Coulson,” Clint replied. “Fabio said anything yet?”

“Not a word,” Phil said. “We got a blip in recordings a few hours ago, but other than that he’s just sat there.”

That was a bad sign. There were only two types of people who sat there and didn’t talk. “Hard case, or broken?”

“Can’t say yet,” Phil said, glancing back towards the office they’d repurposed for holding. “Could be both.”

True enough. When blondie had failed to move the hammer, he’d _screamed_. Clint hadn’t heard many grown men scream like that. Especially not after kicking that much ass. You’d think he’d lost the fight, or he’d just seen someone die.

“What’s your take on him?” Phil asked.

Clint raised his hands, careful not to spill his precious energy drink. “Nat’s the expert, not me. All I know is that someone trained that guy well. Don’t recognise his moves. Aggressive to the point of stupid, but if _I_ could beat my way barehanded through a dozen guys like that, I might do the exact same thing he did.” It wasn’t especially insightful analysis. Anyone who’d seen their mysterious visitor last night could’ve come up with that. Clint added, “And he’s definitely done this sort of thing before. No hesitation, picked the weak spot in patrols, good sense of the layout, minimum necessary force. Not just a trained fighter - he’s professional military or paramilitary of some sort.”

Phil simply nodded. “We’re not getting anything from our databases.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Like he just fell from the sky?”

They glanced towards the hub of their makeshift base, the crater where the mysterious hammer was still firmly lodged in its rock. “Yes,” Phil said. “A bit like that.”

 

—

 

He lost track of time.

The little human, who could not possibly be the greatest warrior of those who opposed him the night before yet appeared to be in charge in any case, soon realised that Thor had nothing to say, and departed again. Leaving Thor alone. Again.

In truth he did not know what he could have said to the human even if he thought he could speak through the grief and guilt choking him. It was strangling, poisonous, a weight inside of him that sapped all energy and most thought. And what thought was left to him…

His father, dead. _Dead_. His mother and Loki lost to him. So much so that his mother did not even wish to see him. How she must hate him. Loki on the throne - he did not know whether he felt more helpless despair or wretched, unworthy envy at the thought. His brother had infinite patience for those things he had patience for, and next to none for anything else. He had a silver tongue and finer manners than Thor ever did, but though he could avoid most disputes he found the solving of them dull. Loki - Loki would be a good king, but an unhappy one. Thor could be there, helping -

\- if it weren’t for what he’d done.

Vain, cruel, and greedy, his father had said. Boy, he had said. Mjolnir must agree, for she had refused to move under his hand. Thor thought _he_ might agree.

He was never going to get the chance to apologise.

It was a long time before Thor so much as thought to move, and that was only because the mortal body he was now trapped in was making demands of him. Various small discomforts became more pressing, though they still couldn’t compare to the terrible lethargy of his grief.

Two men came in to escort him to the hygienic facilities. They put the frail metal chains around his wrists first and treated him with the utmost caution. Thor could not bring himself to tell them they had nothing to fear from him. He could still snap the chain between the cuffs, even in this mortal body, but he wouldn’t. He cooperated instead.

They passed a small window on the short trip there. Outside, the sun was shining. Thor had not felt the storm recede. There was no responsive pull in his blood in this form, only the most minimal sense of air and humidity, and no sense at all by which to gauge the energy around him. Even colours looked flat through mortal eyes. Father, mother, brother, friends, home, and even the storm. All lost to him through his own arrogance and thoughtlessness.

When he was returned to the little room they were using as a cell, there was a meal waiting. No cutlery, and all the serving vessels were of paper. Thor recognised none of the actual food given to him, and ate with little spirit for enjoyment.

Afterwards, he felt more energy almost despite himself. And, well, he did not know what it said about him as a man, but giving in to despair was not in his nature.

His father was dead, his mother hated him, his brother and his friends would not see him again, his home was out of his reach, and the storm had turned its back on him. He would grieve for all that, probably for the rest of his life, but nor would he repeat his mistakes. No doubt Loki would say that it wasn’t that simple, and it probably wasn’t, but if the problem was that Thor was a vain, cruel, greedy child, the solution was to _stop_. He would try again, make Midgard his home, and do better.

Admittedly, he hadn’t the slightest idea where to start with that task.

Thor tried to compose himself, and waited for the little man to come to him again with more questions.

 

—

 

Phil wanted to keep him watching their new blond friend. “I think we’d all rather any engagement took place from a distance,” he said. Unsaid: this guy could’ve left a trail of corpses behind him just as easily as he’d left the trail of bruised and bleeding guys. Nobody was going to just leave that up to their mystery guest’s good will and gentle handling. That meant Clint on backup, ready to put a bullet or an arrow in him as soon as he moved wrong.

Not that anything remotely like that had been a problem. The blond hadn’t started any trouble. Or participated in any. Or done any _anything_. He’d sat in his chair, barely moving a muscle, expression somewhere between sullen and stony.

If someone had told him yesterday that Clint would be guarding a mystery operative who’d punched his way through a whole team of SHIELD agents guarding a possible artefact from space, and it would be boring, he wouldn’t have believed them. And here Clint had been rooting for this guy.

Blondie looked up as Phil entered the room this time. Phil noticed too. “Are you ready to cooperate this time?” he asked.

The blond took his time over answering. “It depends on what you would have me do,” he said at last. Deep voice. Steady. Clint couldn’t place the accent. Nothing he recognised. Much like how Blondie fought.

“We can start with you giving us your name,” Phil said pleasantly.

Another long, thoughtful pause. “Thor,” the man said at last.

Terrific. He wasn’t even taking this seriously. Hard case it was. Clint mentally upped the odds that he’d have to shoot Blondie full of something pointy. Tranqs or arrows, that was the question.

Phil, though, there was a reason Phil took point on this sort of thing before Clint did - at least, when Nat wasn’t around. Phil didn’t bat an eyelid, and instead said, “Okay. Got a surname?”

“No,” the blond said.

“No, you won’t tell me, or no, you don’t have a surname?”

“I do not have a surname,” the blond said. There was a hint of something else in that voice. Anger? Grief? Hard to tell between the two, sometimes. “I am disowned and an exile. I have no right to call myself my father’s son, nor to introduce myself as being of my former home. My name is Thor. It is the only name I have.”

Maybe not a hard case, then, if he was being this chatty. Maybe an alien, or maybe just good old crazy. It was often harder than he’d like to rule out crazy.

But Phil, ever calm, ever reliable, nodded as if this happened to him every day. “Would you consent to coming down to see our doctors?” he asked.

“What for?”

“Just the usual,” Phil said.

Their possibly-alien captive consented, and Clint scrambled for a position from which he could cover the entire trip there. Blondie - Clint seriously didn’t know if he could think of the guy as Thor - followed Phil like a large, dejected duckling. He didn’t so much as glance at the hammer when they passed it. What he did look at were the couple of guys nursing bruises. He got his fair share of dirty looks in return. Clint couldn’t blame them. He wouldn’t have liked to take those punches either.

Once they’d reached the doctor, Blondie let his fingerprints be taken. Without much apparent understanding of the process, so there went the whole informed consent deal if he wasn’t lying. He was a bit more resistant to letting the doctors at his hair, before he sighed and acquiesced. But when the doctors asked for a blood sample -

“I will forego my pride, but not my _wits_ ,” Blondie snarled. “You may not have my blood.”

“I can get the paperwork,” Phil said, as from his vantage point, Clint prepared to take a shot after all. So much for docile. “Unidentified man shows up at a top secret site and assaults a dozen of my people? A judge would sign that warrant in a heartbeat, and we’d _take_ your blood. It’s up to you.”

“A judge? Warrant? This is a matter of law?”

“Sure, you can call it that.”

Blondie mulled it over. For a guy who’d beat up a team of secret agents while attempting to retrieve a mystery satellite without hesitation (with outright _glee_ ), he seemed to find the argument 'it’s the law' strangely compelling. “What do you want my blood for?” he asked.

“DNA,” Phil said. That got him nothing but a blank look, so he tried again, “We want it to help us identify you.”

“I have already identified myself,” Blondie protested. “As much as I am able.”

“Not enough, by our standards.”

More thinking. “You swear to me that you require my blood only for the purpose you stated? That it is needful under the laws of this realm?” he asked. “And you swear that you will destroy it once this purpose is fulfilled?”

Phil nodded. “I swear,” he said.

“Swear by the blood of your own father and mother,” Blondie insisted. “Or - or whatever it is that the people of this realm swear by. Something that means something.”

It was only because Clint knew Phil that he could tell the man’s eyebrows wanted to climb all the way to his hairline. Progress was progress, in any case, and it meant nobody would have to try and strap this guy down and stick him with a needle. “By the power invested in me as an agent of the US government, and on my honour as an agent of SHIELD, I, Phillip Coulson, swear to you, Thor, that the blood taken from you will only be used for the purposes I told you of, to aid us in keeping the law in this realm, and that it will be destroyed once this purpose is fulfilled.”

The blond subsided, and Clint relaxed a fraction. Only a fraction, though. He did _not_ trust that temper. Nor could he trust that Fabio wouldn’t flip out about something else that wasn’t a big deal. At least Phil’s promise seemed to be acceptable to Blondie, because he allowed the doctor to take his blood after that.

They escorted him back to his temporary cell after that. After all, they couldn’t just let him go. It did at least mean that Clint wasn’t required to have an arrow on him at all times.

Phil found him again doing paperwork. “Any more thoughts?” Phil asked him.

“If he’s lying, he’s a better actor than Nat,” he said. “He’s either an alien or he’s crazy.”

“He’s definitely not a lawyer,” Phil said. “You interested in what his bloodwork turns up?”

“Hell yeah,” Clint said.

 

—

 

Thor was growing restless. At home - no, on Asgard - if it were found he had attacked these people unjustly, he would have had every bruise he inflicted returned to him, and released to a stint of labour to compensate society for his crime. Imprisonment for terms longer than a few hours was not a punishment his - that Asgardians used much. Sometimes it was used to manage those who, lost in either wickedness or insanity, could not be trusted to honour their sentence, who needed treatment more than punishment, were to be sent offworld, or who were simply too dangerous to exile (as he had already been exiled - he had piled crime upon crime). Otherwise, leaving body and mind to rot in confinement was both cruel and useless.

Or so he’d been taught, and he was feeling the cruelty now. He needed to do something. Anything.

He set to pacing the interior of his little holding cell. Back and forth, back and forth. The movement helped soothe his darker thoughts a little. The grief kept coming back. His father - would they have sent him off in honour? How did his brother fare? His mother? Not knowing was a terrible thing. He wished that he could see them just one last time. That he could say goodbye properly.

After an hour’s pacing, a man came into his cell. Not the small man, the son of Coul, who had been asking him questions. This man was taller, clearly a warrior. An archer, to judge by his arms. “Okay, Goldilocks,” he said. “I can’t stand watching you tear up the floor like this. If we let you out for a bit, you promise not to make a break for it?”

“Make a break…?” Thanks to the Allfather’s magic, the local language was no mystery - but the idiom. It was always the idiom. ‘Goldilocks,’ he presumed, was meant to be him.

“Try to run away,” the warrior said. “Run around, fine, you look like a guy in desperate need of a jog, but no trying to leave the base. Got it?”

“Got it,” Thor said. “Thank you. That is a kind offer.”

“Yeah, well. We’re not set up for detainees here, so this is all on faith, and you’ve been weirdly cooperative for a guy who busted into a blacksite.”

Thor had no idea what _that_ meant. But since he was back outside, he could let it be. “Where would I be permitted to run?” he asked. He doubted that they would trust him enough to allow him to spar with anyone. He had nobody to blame but himself for that.

“Just around the buildings,” the warrior said, unlocking the chains around his wrists. Not just an archer’s build, but an archer’s callouses too. “If anyone yells at you, tell them Coulson okayed it and send them to me.”

Realisation struck. “Forgive me,” Thor said, “It seems I have neglected to ask you your name.” This was not a good start to his vow to be a better and more thoughtful man than he had thus far been.

“Agent Barton,” the warrior said.

“Agent Barton,” he repeated, and bowed his head respectfully. “I am Thor.”

How it stung, to leave off _Odinson_. But as the next thing to a kinslayer and a patricide, he had no right. It would not be proper. To continue to call himself an Odinson after his actions had led to his father’s death would be _boasting_ of it. The thought was sickening.

Agent Barton, however, raised an eyebrow and said, “You’re sticking with that?”

“It’s my name,” Thor said.

“Okay, man,” Agent Barton said. “Anyway. Half an hour of free time. Knock yourself out.”

Thor set off at a steady run, not willing to waste that time. He could feel Barton’s eyes on him, cool and assessing as any predator’s. Agent Barton would not miss an escape attempt, even should Thor feel inclined to make one. The day was hot, and this was not a picturesque area of Midgard, but exertion was exertion. He focused on his his steps, and on breathing. He did not cross the fence, though once or twice he had to climb over a makeshift building. It was more difficult as a human - he simply lacked the strength and stamina.

Nevertheless, when he returned to the watchful Agent Barton, the man said, “You’re faster than you look.”

“All the strength in the world would do me little good if I could never catch my opponents, nor land a blow on them,” Thor agreed. “Though an archer would know that.”

Agent Barton raised his eyebrows. “You know your way around a bow, then?”

“Only enough not to shoot my own foot,” Thor said. “My teachers insisted on competence, but where archery was concerned, they gave up on excellence.” In truth he was a little better than that, but it never did to give away all one’s skills to a potential opponent.

“More than most people I’ve worked with, then,” Agent Barton said. “I take it you’re a hand-to-hand guy.”

Thor thought of Mjolnir, so close and yet as far out of his reach as his family in Asgard. “Yes,” he said. “Now.”

He changed the subject, instead asking Agent Barton for those stories most any warrior was proud to share - maybe not enemies defeated and battles won, since he _did_ appear to be a lawkeeper and sometimes they were secretive in the best interests of their realm - but tales of pure prowess. In an archer’s case, shots made and shots missed in particularly notable fashion. Agent Barton turned out to be a font of such stories. He had a long career as a warrior behind him already, it seemed.

Listening to Agent Barton, he could almost be back home. The Warriors Three and Sif would appreciate the man’s stories, he was sure. Even Loki might find amusement in some of them.

When they returned to the small cell Thor was rapidly growing to hate, Agent Barton said, “Look. If you need something small, just let someone know, okay? We’re not into torturing prisoners as a rule. We can manage, like, toothpaste or a novel or something. As for the bigger stuff, Coulson’s not a total hardass either. Cooperate and he’ll do his best for you.”

Thor smiled. “There are few things I want that you can give me, Agent Barton.”

“But there are some?”

He thought about it. It didn’t take long. It was a short list. “Three things,” he said.

Agent Barton nodded. “Shoot. I’ll take them to Coulson.”

“First, I promised Lady Jane Foster that I would do my utmost to retrieve her equipment and research.” He still had very little idea what she did or why these warriors of the Shield would want it, but that was immaterial. He’d promised. “Second, I would appreciate the opportunity to apologise to those I struck on my way here, since I did so unjustly. And third, I would very much like something to do. Something useful, if there is any such task your people could trust me with.”

Just from Agent Barton’s expression, Thor knew that he’d get none of it. It had been worth trying; he’d make more attempts to have Jane’s work returned to her. “I’ll take it to Coulson,” Barton said. “In the meantime, I’m pretty sure Sitwell’s got a paperback or two you can borrow.”

A paperback turned out to be a novel, printed and bound in paper. Thor started reading it, for lack of anything better to do. He didn’t know enough about Midgard to grasp much beyond the basics of the book’s plot (a warrior lacking his memory set out to find it), but it was at least something he could do.

And little enough at that.


	2. Professionals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint and Coulson work out a possibility for dealing with their intruder.

“I know that look,” Phil said, before Clint could so much as open his mouth, and without even looking up from his paperwork. “You’re planning something.”

“I am not.”

“Then you’re going to be planning something in the next few days.” He looked up. “What does this have to do with our guest?”

“I let him out for a run,” Clint admitted. “You didn’t see him. He was about to start punching the walls.”

Phil made an _mmmm_ sound. “I’m assuming he didn’t try to escape.”

“There was a moment when I thought he was going to climb the fence, but he stayed on the right side. Climbed the buildings instead.” He sat himself down in front of Phil’s temporary desk. “Built some rapport in the process. Got some requests from him.”

“Does he want to be taken to our leader?”

“Nope. He wants Foster’s stuff returned to her, he wants to apologise to everyone he beat up, and he wants something useful to do.” He leaned back in his chair. He’d had to maintain a poker face hearing those requests, but Phil didn’t. Not that Phil’s surprised face was all that different to his poker face. “It’s really not helping me sort out the alien-or-crazy question.”

After a long pause in which Phil didn’t add another word to his paperwork, he said, “I wouldn’t think so. We can let him make his apologies, at least.”

“You gonna stop people from punching him back when he does?”

“It would be mistreatment of a prisoner otherwise.” Phil pushed a packet of papers towards Clint. “Bloodwork’s back. It appears our guest is human.”

Clint took it, feeling oddly disappointed. “So he’s just crazy, then.”

“Keep reading.”

He did. Beyond the executive summary that Blondie’s hair and blood were 100% human normal, they’d added that there was strange stuff on and in it, and the techs had written stuff like _doesn’t look like he was exposed to normal conditions_ and _can’t tell you anything else without a better lab_ and, succinctly, _weird shit here._ He could feel his own eyebrows rising. One of the recommendations was _call Stark in on this, he’s better with materials_. That, and _more samples needed._

“Dr Foster’s colleague Dr Selvig dropped by and tried to tell me that our friend was a man named Donald Blake,” Phil said, once Clint had finished. “Donald Blake on a steroid- and alcohol-fuelled rampage.”

“Wow. I hope they’re better at science than they are at lying.”

“Undoubtedly. It would seem that they know a bit more about this Thor than we do. Dr Foster’s work is fringe, but her teachers and colleagues all consider her one of the better minds in the field of astrophysics. The money quote was, I believe, ‘either her work will change the world, or something she scribbles on the back of her grocery receipts will.’”

That meant Blondie wasn’t getting his friend’s notes back anytime soon, in Coulson-speak. Unless Phil decided he needed Foster as well. “So what’s the new theory?” he asked. “Alien abductee?”

“Maybe. I want Natasha to have a look at him, but she’s still tied up with the aftermath of the Stark thing. Who knows how long that’s going to take.”

“I say recruit him,” Clint said. “You saw what he can do. Crazy or not, he’s been cooperative so far, which is always good, and besides, even if he turns out to be hostile, we’ll have an eye on him in the meantime.”

Phil pushed the rest of his paperwork over. “I agree,” he said. Clint looked at the papers - non-standard recruitment forms, and the beginnings of a proper identity for a Mr Thor Smith. “Like I said, Agent Barton, I know that look. Not the first stray you’ve wanted to adopt.”

“That’s fair,” Clint admitted. “You have to admit that my last stray turned out well.”

“He’s not exactly the Black Widow,” Phil agreed. “Though maybe a little more eccentric in some ways.”

Clint smiled. “Smith?” he asked.

“When all you have is a hammer,” Phil said. “I’ll make the pitch to him tonight.”

 

—

 

The book could only hold his attention so long. Every paragraph took an enormous effort to read due to everything he had to figure out from context. It would get easier. Eventually. Just like any training.

In the meantime, he still needed something, just to get his mind off everything else. He was not made to remain idle.

With an effort, Thor reminded himself that jumping into action without considering the consequences was what had ended him up in exile in the first place.

No, that wasn’t quite right either. Vain, cruel, greedy - it was that he hadn’t considered the consequences to anyone but himself. He had known he might start a war. He hadn’t seen it as anything but an opportunity for glory. To prove himself. He supposed he had. Proved himself unfit and unworthy.

Either way he needed to think more carefully about what he did now.

His self-recrimination was interrupted by a knock on the door. It opened to reveal the son of Coul, carrying another tray with food on it. Thor frowned; he had judged the son of Coul to be the highest-ranking of the Agents of the Shield he’d met thus far, and yet he brought Thor dinner? Either he wanted something, or Midgard was strange. Both were possible. The son of Coul looked at the book that Thor had set aside, and said, “Agent Barton gave that to you, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Thor said. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” Coulson said. “Just his sense of humour.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“That’s all right.” He set the tray down in front of Thor, then pulled up his own chair across from him. “Speaking of Agent Barton, though, he told me you talked earlier.”

“We did,” Thor said cautiously.

“He told me there were a few things you wanted.”

That small smile was unnerving, Thor decided. It reminded him of Loki, when Loki had a trick planned and ready to spring, and his victim's back was turned. He wondered whether Coulson was the same, and if so, where the trick was. “They are requests only,” he said. “I have trespassed upon more than just your hospitality.”

“Some of them are easy enough to manage,” Coulson said. “If you really do want to apologise.”

“Of course I want to apologise,” Thor said hotly. Or rather, he didn’t, since apologies were often mortifying and uncomfortably vulnerable, but he wanted to make things right more than he wanted to avoid those feelings. “My actions were unjust, and I hurt others by them. I _should_ apologise.”

“That’s very noble of you,” Coulson said. “As for your other two requests - Dr Foster’s work and something useful for you to do - I think there’s a way we might be able to kill two birds with one stone, here. We can’t just give Dr Foster’s work to her, but we can offer her a consultancy contract and access.”

Thor searched Coulson’s face for any sign of deception. “I don’t understand what it is you offer,” he said.

“We’d let Dr Foster keep working on what she was working on, and we’d pay her to do it,” Coulson explained. “But she wouldn’t own it. It’s not ideal for her, but it’s as good an offer as I’m prepared to make.”

“And in return?”

“You work for us. You said that you wanted something useful to do.”

He did. This sounded like a longer-term arrangement. As though it could be a path to building his own life in Midgard. “What is it that you would have me do?” he asked.

“A lot would depend on how our people assess your skills. Aside from the fighting skills. We all saw those, and we’d still like to know where you learned. Most likely, we’d employ you to provide backup for other agents when things are likely to go wrong.”

Thor mulled it over. He had never been ‘backup’ before. He went in first when he fought. “You are lawkeepers, yes?” he asked. He wanted a path, a purpose, but he did not want to work for villains or rogues.

Coulson hesitated slightly before answering, yet Thor didn’t feel it was a hesitation born of deception, just one in which he decided the best course to take. “Not in a conventional sense,” he said. “SHIELD is meant to protect Earth from threats that are…a little bit _more_ than what most police departments and intelligence agencies handle. We need people who can handle that sort of more. We try not to let them pass us by.”

More. The word hooked on something deep in Thor’s mind. The idea appealed. Very much. It was an offer that would let him fight. Whatever mistakes he’d made in using his skills, none could doubt that he had them. Whatever his brother might say, he did not assume that his greater physical strength would bring him victory. He had trained, he had _learned_ , so that he could better defend Asgard.

And now here he was on Midgard, with nothing _but_ those skills, and these warriors of the Shield asked him to defend Midgard from threats that were _more_.

More, like a warrior of Asgard dropping in from the sky, and taking what he wanted from this realm by force. A threat that was more, like Thor had been just days ago. On Jotunheim as well as Midgard. That had to be his father’s point. He had made himself exactly the threat these people sought to defend themselves against. He felt ill.

This would be fitting penance, he decided.

“I would read any contract you would have me sign, first,” he said. Just to make sure. “But yes. That offer sounds acceptable to me in principle.”

“Excellent,” Coulson said briskly. “Now, this is somewhat embarrassing for our agency, but we’ve been unable to work out just where you come from. If you care to tell us, great. As part of your employment we will furnish you with an identity you can live with, if you need one. Surname included.”

Grief wrapped choking fingers around Thor’s throat once more. “I will not take another man’s name nor claim another home,” he said. He couldn’t. Maybe in time he would be able to bear the replacement - to call Midgard his home, with pride - but even exiled he could not help but think of himself as a son of Asgard.

“Would a profession-based name suit you? ‘Smith’ is a nice, common surname.”

“Yes,” Thor said.

They spoke for some time. Employment on Midgard was apparently complicated, and even more so by the fact that Thor had no human identity. Coulson had to let him know what to expect. There would be tests to take, paperwork to fill out, a false background to learn, and all the details that warriors of the Shield were expected to learn as a matter of course. Some of them were well beyond Thor’s comprehension at present. He had never used a ‘gun,’ nor a ‘computer;’ he had never encountered an ‘appropriate workplace behaviour’ policy, nor been paid a salary.

“We’ll have time to get the issues ironed out,” Coulson said. He seemed pleased by his night’s work. Thor could only hope he did a worthy job, and his services balanced out the trouble he’d already caused.

“Might I take this proposal to Lady Jane myself?” Thor asked. “I wish to thank her for her assistance.”

Coulson regarded him thoughtfully. “All right,” he said at last. “Not alone, you understand, in case Dr Foster has more questions.”

It made sense. He had no idea what Jane Foster might find worthy recompense for her labour. And if it was him they wanted to watch, more than Lady Jane, he could hardly blame them for that. “Thank you, son of Coul.”

“Agent Coulson will do, Mr Smith.”

It sounded too informal to show proper respect, but Thor repeated it all the same. He was a resident of Midgard for life, now, and he had to learn.

 

—

 

“You’re gonna wear a hole in the floor,” Darcy said. “Stop fretting. If the Men in Black were going to arrest you, they’d’ve done it by now.”

“Not comforting,” Jane snapped back, and kept pacing. “Even if they don’t arrest me, that’s _everything_ gone. My entire career. Goodbye grants. I’m going to be teaching, if that.” Just when she’d started hoping again, too. Amazing what a man dropping from the sky could do for your scientific theories.

She hoped Thor was okay too. God of Thunder, alien, or whatever, he’d gone in there promising to get her research out. _He’d_ probably been arrested. She really, really hoped that Erik was just being paranoid about SHIELD.

They’d even taken her lab inventory, so she couldn’t work out how much she should charge SHIELD for what they’d taken from her. Would they object to paying her for the inconvenience? The lost opportunity? Spite? She definitely felt like taking a few extra thousand dollars from them out of spite.

“ _I_ think not getting arrested is comforting,” Darcy said. Then, “Oh, hey. Men in Black at twelve o’clock.”

“It’s only ten -“ Jane started, and then stopped, because there were Men in Black approaching. Including Thor, in a different shirt. He looked - not beaten up at all. Just tired and drawn. Still unfairly attractive for all that, though, damned hormones. Now was _not_ the time. “Oh my god.”

“So maybe I was wrong,” Darcy said, nervous now. “Maybe we are going to get arrested.”

Maybe, but in that case, why bring Thor? Erik had tried to get him back from the government compound-thing, with no success, they had to know - at least they had to suspect, right? But there Thor was. Not vanished to Area 51 or wherever.

He caught sight of her through the window and smiled. Jane _really_ hated hormones right about now. Her heart was beating hard enough from stress, thanks. More on topic, if he was smiling, it couldn’t be all bad news, right?

Unless - unless he was an alien who had no idea how things worked on Earth. Damn. Not reassuring at all, then.

Jane watched with trepidation as Thor spoke to the agent who’d overseen the theft of her research, broke off from the group, and then came over to the door. He knocked, and asked, “May I enter?”

“Uh, yes! Yes, of course!” And Jane was exactly petty and pissed off enough to shut the door after letting Thor in, right in Agent Smug’s face. “What _happened_? Are you all right? We tried to get to see you, or have them let you go, but they wouldn’t let us -“

“You attempted to secure my release?” He looked surprised at that. “I thank you. It only makes what I have to tell you all the more grievous. I was not able to secure the release of your work without condition. I managed to arrange terms with the warriors of the Shield, but I fear what they offer is not what you would want.”

“You -? You actually _asked_? After they arrested you?”

Thor looked at her, and wow, his eyes were very blue. “I gave you my word,” he said. “I apologise for not being able to retrieve your work in full.” He offered her a packet of papers. “They called it, I believe, consultancy?”

Jane took the papers. Consultancy. She wouldn’t own her work. It would belong to SHIELD. There would be next to no chance of publishing anything. There were _reasons_ she’d chosen to work in the university context, rather than in industry. “I’ll need to read all this,” she said.

“Of course.”

“How did you even get them to offer this?” she asked, eyes on the contract. It seemed legitimate at first glance. And a great deal more than what she’d expected to have just five minutes ago. The contract even specified that the check Agent Smug offered her was still valid, on top of what Jane suspected was a moderately generous rate of payment for her additional work. In her experience, which might have been limited to the government agency walking in and stealing her stuff experience of a few days before plus a bit more hearsay, the Men in Black weren’t generous without ulterior motive.

“A simple bargain,” he said. “They wished to offer me employment as well.”

Uh-oh. Maybe he _was_ about to get whisked off to Area 51. “Employment for what?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Fighting, mostly,” he said. “I have some strength at arms.”

She did not look at his arms at those words. She was quite proud of her restraint. “Are you sure about that?” she asked. “I mean, I know I just met you, and I _did_ kind of hit you with my car twice, but these people aren’t always very nice. Are you sure it’s safe?”

He smiled again. “I thank you for your concern,” he said. “Safety is not one of mine. I am used to fighting. I assaulted several members of this Shield, and they have offered me a most generous and kindly means of making restitution to them. And of upholding my promise to you as well.”

What did you say to that, exactly? SHIELD had well and truly stolen her probable alien out from under her. Which was not a sentence she’d be saying aloud in Darcy’s hearing, oh god, never. So she said, “Okay. If you’re sure.” And then, “Thank you.”

Thor looked at her very seriously and said, “If I had not landed here, your work would still be yours.”

“That’s not your fault,” Jane said. “I mean. I’m assuming you didn’t want to land here.”

Oh yeah, she was talking to an alien, all right. Jane had never dared envison that she’d make first contact, and she’d certainly never envisoned humanity’s first official contact with an alien being would be her hitting said being with her van.

“I did not,” Thor said. “But I landed here all the same, and I cannot say my own actions did not contribute to the situation. It’s not fair for you to bear the cost.”

He might well be right about that, but he was so sincere that it was hard to resent him for it. “You did more than a lot of people would,” Jane said, looking up at him (there were too many tall people in the world, honestly). “I don’t blame you.”

He smiled at her again. She could feel herself smiling back.

Then Darcy coughed, loud and fake. “Um, guys. We still got the agents to deal with. You can make eyes at each other later.”

Oh, right. Jane looked away, back at the papers Thor had offered her. “I need to read these,” she said again, trying to get back on track. “I’ll probably have questions.”

“That is why the son of Coul has accompanied me here,” Thor said. “I know he has not treated you fairly thus far, but he has treated me well. He is not incapable of honourable dealing.”

“Well then,” Jane said. “I might consider letting him in for a while.”


	3. Settle and Resettle

Unfortunately, Clint didn’t manage to get the time to make a secure call home until after Cooper’s bedtime. “I’ll be home in a week or so,” he promised Laura, after a twenty-minute conversation about anything _but_ his work. Hers, mostly, and of course Cooper, the best kid in the world. “Trust me, this is a big thing. A big, mostly confidential thing.”

“In New Mexico,” Laura said, more amused than anything.

“In New Mexico. Can you stock up on the good coffee next grocery trip? The only halfway decent caffeine here is in energy drink form. I’ve got serious cravings here.”

“I think I can manage that. A week or so, you said?”

“About that.” Clint wanted to tell her everything, right now. He probably did tell her more than he should. But one of the reasons he knew he could trust Laura was because she never pushed for more information. “I’ll let you know if that changes.” If he got the chance. “Love you two.”

“We love you too,” Laura said, and ended the call. Clint missed her already, and hated that he’d missed the chance to speak to his son. In a few years, he’d dial back his work for SHIELD, be a real dad to Cooper, not running out to spy all the time. He and Laura both wanted more kids. Clint wanted to be there for them.

First there was work to do, and another call to make. He dialled Nat’s current burner, the one she only let him, Laura (for emergencies), Phil, and Fury himself know about. Not to mention he could get some shop talk with a friend in too.

Nat’s phone rung, and rung, and rung. At last, she picked up. “Clint? What’s going on?”

“Stark’s been in the news,” he said. “Didn’t get a chance to call and ask about it before I left.”

“What makes you think I had anything to do with it?”

He snorted. “I saw a few clips of what happened at Hammer’s head office. Plus Phil told me you were there.”

“All right. You got me.”

“So what’s he like?” Clint asked. “Phil said he had to threaten to taze him just to get him to behave for thirty seconds.” It was more than just curiosity about a celebrity (and Laura was _fascinated_ by Iron Man). Clint had seen the proposals for this Avengers Initiative. If he and Nat ended up working with Stark…it’d be nice to know if the man was that unmanageable.

Nat sighed. “Smartest person I’ve ever met,” she said. “Too smart for his own good. Too smart for the good of anyone standing next to him. And he’s more than a little arrogant.”

She told him everything after that. Her mission had already made the national news - overshadowed by Stark, of course, but her handiwork was in a bunch of related articles and the like. If Nat didn’t tell him, it wasn’t as if he couldn’t piece it together. Phil and Fury got that, just like they got that Nat was more likely to stick around if she and Clint were friends. “What about you?” she asked, when she’d finished her recap. “I know you’re on a mission right now too.”

“Phil wants to bring you in on it,” Clint said. “We’re headed back to New York in two days.”

“What are you bringing with you?” she asked.

If anyone asked Clint, she sounded _way_ too longsuffering. “Trust me, it’s neat. Potential alien.”

“Alien, as in…”

“Little green men from Mars,” Clint said. “Only less little and green, not from Mars, and more like a cross between a one-man assault team, a frat boy, and a sad golden retriever. DNA test came back showing human, but human with a whole bunch of weird trace elements on and in everything, so _my_ money’s on ‘abducted by aliens.’ Phil’s not ruling out ‘insane person’ yet. You can still get in on this.”

He filled her in on the scientist who’d been screwing around with wormholes in the middle of the New Mexico desert, only to get surprisingly good results when an unidentified object (that looked a lot like a hammer) fell from the sky, and possibly a person too. A person who’d promptly, spectacularly, battered his way through more of SHIELD than anyone had a right to. “Phil managed to recruit him,” Clint finished, “So, like I said, we’re bringing him back to New York.”

For a few seconds after that announcement, Nat said nothing.

“Nat?”

“My training doesn’t cover aliens,” she said. “I don’t like this, Clint. Stark’s bad enough. He’s taken the lid off something. Vanko designed his gear specifically to counter him, and it’s not going to stop. I’ve been hearing some things about Brazil, the Hulk - and now aliens? What happens to deal with things like them? The world’s getting weirder.”

“It’s always been bigger than us,” Clint said. “Look, whatever this guy is, we know next to nothing about him, and you’re harder to fool than some scientific tests I’ve seen done. He gets antsy when he’s shut up in a room with nothing to do, he screamed when he couldn’t pick up that hammer thing, and one of his conditions for cooperating with us was that we let him apologise to the people he hit when he was breaking in. He’s a person. Person enough for you to deal with.”

Another silence, and then Nat said, “All right. I’m in. I can already tell you’re in the adopting mood again. You know that everything would be easier if you and Laura just had the dozen kids you obviously want to have, right?”

“On what we make? What if any of these hypothetical dozen kids want to go to college?”

“Scholarships.”

The conversation was a bit lighter after that. Nat liked Cooper, so Clint could indulge all the proud father tendencies he liked.

Later, when he’d hung up and was preparing to catch some well overdue sleep, he had to admit her words about a weirder world hit home. He and Nat, they’d started out at the end of the Cold War. They’d trained for weapons deals and state secrets and double agents. The days of Hydra, Captain America, and the magical super-soldier serum were long gone.

Or they’d _been_ long gone. One way or another, Cooper was going to have to grow up in that world. There wasn’t much anyone could do to make the Hulk less threatening, maybe, but there was no reason the aliens had to be utter dicks.

Clint was on the optimistic side for a secret agent, he knew. It helped keep him sane.

 

—

 

They were going to be taking him to a different settlement the next day, Agent Coulson (still a strange title on his tongue) had informed him. A different, much larger human settlement. When he asked for information, he was given a small computing device with a ‘website’ on it called ‘wikipedia’. The city of New York, where they were taking him, had a population only slightly smaller than that of all Asgard. What humans lacked in longevity they made up for in numbers.

It was also most of the way across the landmass known as North America. They would be flying there, on a metal contraption they called an aeroplane. He understood air pressure well enough, but he wasn’t familiar with Midgardian engineering.

He missed Mjolnir already, and the joy of flight.

Thor sought and gained permission to visit Lady Jane again before they departed. Humans didn’t know of life on other realms, Thor had quickly realised, now he was paying more attention to those things outside his own cares. Aliens, they called foreigners to their realm, with no distinction beyond native to Midgard, and not native to Midgard. Where the warriors of the Shield saw threats (not without reason, Thor thought, thinking of his prior behaviour), Jane saw the opportunity to learn.

Before, he would have gone with the warriors with hardly another thought to the matter. Now, he was alone on a strange realm, and scrambling for the knowledge that even a Midgardian _child_ knew. He had seen a little of her work now, and some of the agents in the building talked of it. Lady Jane might be seeking after knowledge Asgardian children were taught in school, but when he compared her efforts to learn to his own, it was clear to see the deftness and power of her mind.

Also, she had been kind to him (even when he had not been so kind to her), and she was very beautiful. Thor saw no reason _not_ to want to know her better.

“Take her notebook and the iPod,” Agent Coulson said. “We’ve copied what Dr Foster’s written, but the original might have some sentimental value.”

A younger agent by the name of Goldman generously drove Thor into town in the course of his own errands, and Thor took the opportunity to apologise for striking him. The bruise had started to turn yellow. Thor hadn’t realised humans healed so slowly, either. He’d caused more pain than he’d thought.

“Misunderstandings happen. Don’t worry about it and don’t hit me again,” Goldman said, “And we’ll be fine.”

Thor did his best to put it out of his mind, as instructed. It was easier when Jane smiled to see him. “You’re back,” she said.

“Only for an hour,” he said. “And I must say my farewells for the time being. Tomorrow I am to leave.”

He did not imagine the disappointment on Jane’s face. If he was a different man, one who cared less for his promises, he might renege on his commitments to the Shield for that expression. It wasn’t just that she was unhappy. To his own disquiet, he was afraid. He was alone and ignorant - _powerless_ , for the first time in his life - and Jane was kind.

Thor was not used to being powerless. While he had worked in teams before, and enjoyed it far more than working alone at that, he was not used to being so utterly dependent on others. Always before he had something of value to offer. While he could still fight, he knew that if the Shield had decided to bring all their force to bear, he would be dead or captive. Agent Barton in particular, who had so kindly allowed him to run and who had lent him the paperback, could have slain him from above with his arrows. With ease.

“I did bring you something,” he continued, and gave Jane the notebook.

If she was fair of face even angry and tired, when she was happy she was _radiant_. “Oh, thank you, thank you!” She held it in a way that showed how precious it was to her. “It’s ten years worth of work,” she explained. “All my theories. Everything.”

“You study the Bifrost, do you not?”

With that question, Jane started explaining her work to him, familiar concepts in unfamiliar words. When she was done, she looked up at him, eyes shining, and asked, “How do your people think of it?”

She was close already, and it was hardly secret knowledge that would compromise Asgard’s wellbeing, and he’d seen her face change from disappointment to delight. So he told her, and watched the shine in her eyes. The hour went very quickly indeed, and at the end she gave him the number that would allow him to call her by a Midgardian ‘phone,’ whenever he got one.

“I’ll probably see you again,” she said. “If I’m going to be consulting for SHIELD on my own damn original research, ugh. I _need_ to pick your brain on this again.”

“That sounds unexpectedly violent,” Thor said. “Idiom, I assume?”

“Idiom,” Jane assured him. “It just means I want to talk to you about this again and see what else you know. You will call when you get a phone, right?”

He promised, and they parted on good terms. It was not a conversation such as he’d had with any of the Warriors Three, or Sif, or Loki. Nor had he discussed such things with any of his previous paramours. It was, Thor thought, a good kind of different.

On the way back, Agent Goldman said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so happy we confiscated all their stuff. If you’re not careful Coulson’ll stick you on ‘mollifying civilian’ duty all the time.”

“If civilians are all like her, I don’t think I’d object,” Thor said, and earned a laugh from his companion. The ride back was a good deal more amiable than the ride to the town had been, and he dared to hope that he was making some progress in Midgard.

 

—

 

Today, Natasha was going to meet an alien. That meant right now, it was time to look over everything Clint sent her.

There wasn’t enough footage of the fight that had convinced Phil to make a recruiting bid more or less on the spot. Just about every camera had been trained on the hammer stuck in the rock. There were a few shots of their alien (or space-associated visitor) tearing through the perimeter towards the building, and the cameras around the hammer caught a bit of the alien’s fight with the giant Agent Crayshaw. Comparing the time elapsed to the casualty report had her agreeing with Clint’s analysis - efficient plus non-lethal equalled professional. Someone like her or Clint, perhaps, alien or not, retrieving the hammer. He’d known exactly what he was breaking in for and went straight for it.

From what little she’d seen, she wasn’t familiar with the alien’s fighting style or training either. She was either going to have to watch him fight, or fight him herself. The latter would tell her more.

Next came the things they actually had footage of: Phil’s first, less than productive, interrogation. It didn’t take a specialist to see that she was looking at a devastated man. Because he’d failed to get the hammer? Impossible to say without talking to him.

Clint’s notes included the skip in recording, where they’d lost about a minute of footage. The techs blamed the hammer throwing off weird spikes of energy. Superficially, their alien guest was the same before and after, slumped in his chair, but when she looked more closely - tears? No sign of tears before the skip. Tears afterwards. There were other signs of increased agitation, too. Heavier breathing, and he’d started looking towards the corners more, as if trapped.

It might be a coincidence, that the alien’s circumstances dawned on him and provoked a breakdown, just as the film skipped. Or it might not be. They couldn’t afford to overlook the possibility that someone had communicated with him in that frame of time. That said, the incident clearly prompted the alien to start playing more nicely with Phil. If someone _had_ communicated with him, they’d cut him loose.

There were other reports about the days afterwards. What he’d said about his name piqued Natasha’s interest. Disowned and exiled, and therefore no surname? He came from someone that used patronymics, he’d said as much. Before he’d come here, he was Thor Someonesson. Whoever that someone was, he loved them.

She thought he was telling the truth about that, too. Hard to fake that sort of distress. He’d accepted being called _Smith_ readily enough, despite his objections to a surname that would link him to another person or place.

Mostly, she needed to see for herself.

When the cars pulled up at SHIELD’s buildings, Natasha was there to greet them, as instructed, ready to get their guest and newest sort-of-colleague settled in to an on-base apartment where they could keep a close eye on him. (Not all that unusual for their more irregular recruits, or indeed for more experienced agents based here who didn’t want to deal with New York rent prices combined with security hassles.) First Phil climbed out, then the alien.

He looked bigger in person, though he was not an exceptionally big man. Definitely trained, and trained well. Confident.

Coulson handled the introductions. “Thor, this is Agent Natasha Romanov,” he said. “Agent Romanov, Thor Smith. Agent Romanov will be showing you around, Thor.”

Thor looked at her. It wasn’t a dismissive look, nor a lascivious one. He was sizing her up. She smiled at him, unthreatening but a little flirtatious. He smiled back the same way. Interesting. “This way, Mr Smith,” she said. “I’ll show you the places you need to know about here.”

He made the first conversational move as they peeled off the entryway, keeping up a steady stream of light conversation about New York. He kept it light, too, not touching any topic personal to Natasha nor anything that might be construed as probing too deeply about SHIELD. He maintained the smile, too, with a carefully bland sort of charm meant to keep her at arm’s length without offending her. Natasha eventually dropped her own superficial demeanour, testing a theory, and almost instantly his smiles became less frequent but far more genuine. The difference was striking.

With that thaw, he started asking questions where the answers might affect his own life. “Do many agents of the Shield live here?” was the big one.

“Permanently? A few,” she said. She wasn’t giving him actual numbers. “More stay here for a few weeks at a time, if they’ve got something to keep them here this long.”

When they got to the gym, he looked at the equipment there, totally bemused. “I am not familiar with any of this,” he said.

“Once you get some more clothes, someone’ll show you if you need,” Natasha said. Fury would want to know everything this guy could do, if he was going to hire an alien. They’d put Natasha herself through a similar process, when she’d joined.

They passed a pair of agents practicing hand-to-hand. They weren’t the best SHIELD had to offer, but Natasha could hardly miss the hungry way the alien’s eyes drank in the sight. “Would it be presumptuous to ask you for a match, Lady Natasha, should time allow?” he asked. There was an edge to that smile now.

_Definitely_ trained, and confident to the point of arrogant. She hadn’t been making any particular effort to hide the movements and posture that told that her combat skills were mostly melee-based, but a lot of men missed it anyway. “Not at all,” Natasha said. With any luck he’d be as good as Clint said. There weren’t many people here who could give her a good fight. There were even fewer she was unfamiliar with. “If you hadn’t suggested it, I would have.”

“I will look forward to it, then,” he said.

She took him round to the break room, the lockers, and the firing range. Here, again, he said that he’d never used a gun. Another thing he’d have to be taught. Last thing she did, she took him to the little apartment he’d been assigned, a living area with a strip of kitchenette, one door leading to a bedroom barely large enough for a bed, the other to a bathroom barely large enough for a shower. The main room actually got pretty good light at this time of day. “I’ll let you settle in,” she said.

“With respect, Lady Natasha, I have nothing _to_ settle,” he replied. “I am ready to start my duties whenever required.”

“That’s a fair point,” she said. “Okay, I’ll take you to Coulson, and he’ll take you to Accounting. They’ll get you some pay in advance.”

With that done, she went to find Clint, hundred dollar note up her sleeve. She caught him coming back from his preferred coffee shop, takeaway venti cup in hand. “Verdict?” he asked, heading for a nice little alcove where nobody would be able to hear their conversation.

She brandished the note. “I want in on the pool,” she said, “And he’s definitely an alien, by the way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for your comments, kudos, and bookmarks!


	4. A Day in New York

Clint stared at the $100. “Okay. Why do you say that?”

“He didn’t know _anything_ ,” Natasha said. “I used idiom, it went over his head. I took him to the gym, he hadn’t seen anything in it before. I took him to his rooms, there’s nothing but a bare mattress on a bedframe in there, he doesn’t realise it’s not how most apartments look. He didn’t ask about laundromats or banks or sick leave. Nothing. It’s as though he’s never been exposed to Western culture or any sort of technology before.”

“He speaks English,” Clint said.

“Exactly. How does anyone learn that much English, get that fluent, without ever learning ‘things that you find in the home’ or ‘workplace vocabulary’? Learning the language _is_ learning the culture. Somehow, he got the words and the grammar but nothing else.”

“Maybe he grew up in the depths of the Amazon.”

Natasha shook her head. “He’s old money. Trust me. Wherever he came from, he grew up with people fawning all over him, and someone’s taught him how to deal with beautiful women trying to get him to talk about things he shouldn’t. He did a pretty good job of redirecting the conversation.” Nat was the best because she didn’t rely totally on her looks. If beauty wasn’t working, she had more tactics to use. “He doesn’t want to talk about his home. He told you he was disowned and exiled; he’s used to attention and power and he’s well trained; he’s done something bad. We’re dealing with an alien criminal. Someone whose crimes were severe or political enough to get him kicked out despite his connections.”

He eyes her skeptically. “Mr Please-Allow-Me-Apologise-To-Those-I-Struck?”

“Guilty conscience,” Natasha said, voice flat. “You said he had a temper.”

True. Clint could remember preparing to fire. “Well, if you’re right, it was nice of the aliens to just dump him here unsupervised.” And he’d been hoping the aliens weren’t jerks. With any luck Natasha was wrong…but she wasn’t often wrong. Not about people. “You going to tell Phil?”

“Not just yet. He wanted to spar with me - he asked me. I’ll know more again after that. First he needs some gym clothes. And some everything. Someone’ll need to write him a list of things to get, and probably teach him the basics of Earth money too.”

Clint whistled. “That’s a lot of work.”

“Is he really that good?” Natasha asked. “Seems to me like locking him up in a nice big cell might be safer.”

“Incapacitated like a dozen guys and killed none, came out with only a few minor bruises of his own. If you saw the tapes, you know Phil was fuming.”

“Yes, but - mall cops? Really?”

“Really,” Clint said. “It was good viewing. Not the agency’s finest hour, but good viewing.”

“I’d better practice a bit,” Nat said.

“You love it,” Clint said. Either she got a good, fair fight, win or lose, or she got the pleasure of beating an asshole who underestimated her into the ground. Clint knew she enjoyed both these things.

“True,” she admitted. Then, “For an alien, he’s kind of a disappointment. Not very alien-like at all.”

Clint reminded her, “His blood test reads human.” He thought he knew what she meant, though. Alien or kidnap victim, once someone got Thor up to speed on human culture, nobody would be able to tell that he was anything but a regular person. Not what you expected from visitors from another world. Not at all. That, and he put a lot of stock in Nat’s read of things. If Thor was a criminal, what had he done? But DNA was DNA. “I still say kidnap victim dumped back home.”

She just shrugged. “I can’t absolutely disprove that theory. Yet.”

Clint took a long sip of precious, life-sustaining coffee (a less damaging addiction than to the cigarettes he’d smoked as a younger man). “Enough about aliens. More about billionaires. I’ve never seen the Iron Man gear up close.”

“I didn’t get to see it as closely as I’d like, either. Stark’s like a mother hen with most of his tech.”

He supposed that if you could make things like that, you might get a little protective. “Sounds like you got the boring bits of the job too. Tell me there was at least something cool at Stark Expo. Or Hammer’s labs. I’m not picky.” She smiled, and had just opened her mouth, when their phones both chimed with an incoming text message. Natasha read it and raised her eyebrows. Clint read it and _swore_. “Phil message you as well?” he asked.

“Accounting didn’t realise our alien was an alien and let him out on the streets with a shiny new credit card and a month of pay in advance plus relocation allowance and leave?”

“That’s the one. Come on. You might get your fight earlier than you thought.”

 

—

 

This city of New York was a large one. The buildings towered over him, and Thor felt small in a way he had never felt amongst the equally tall (or even taller) buildings of Asgard. In Asgard, the rooftops and the open skies were only ever a short flight away.

The streets were narrower, too, and people jostled each other as they walked. They jostled _him_ , rather than clearing a respectful path. Hardly anyone paid any mind to him at all. Those that did were those who found him either intimidating or attractive, and even then it was a much more muted reaction than he was used to.

He was just another face on a crowded street. ‘Odinson’ meant nothing here, even if he were still Odinson. Instead he was simply Smith. A man of a trade.

But he was getting distracted. He had work to do. A life to set up. He could do this. He’d spent time on realms other than Asgard; he could work out what he was likely to need and what it would cost. It took exploration, observation, and calculation.

Thor had usually left that task to Loki, when they’d gone travelling together. Thor liked visiting places, but Asgard was his home. It was Loki who enjoyed immersing himself wherever they went, and sometimes stayed on other realms for years. It was Loki who could work out how to dress fashionably within hours of arriving in an unfamiliar city, pick up on the nuances of the language, and always get the best prices at the markets. Thor only had enough of those skills not to make a fool of himself, and right now he was feeling their lack.

Midgard had a few forms of currency. The type he’d been given was the little plastic square. Thor would rather have dealt with the paper. It had been a good decade or two since he’d handled money, and that had been in a form not nearly so…abstract.

It would not be wise to make any purchases until he knew more of what was going on in the shops around him. Midgardians preferred their trade to take place in separate buildings, it seemed. There was only limited variety in the wares offered, too; most of the shops here seemed to sell clothing, and a few of them electronic goods he didn’t recognise. None sold food, for instance, and none furniture. The shops themselves must be in districts, he surmised. Well, he needed more clothing, that was plain. At least one other set. This district was as good a place as any to start.

Thor found a bench and watched the people on the street, trying to do as his brother did, and puzzle out what clothing marked the various groups of Midgardian society, and through that work out what he himself would need.

After a few minutes, he became aware of eyes on his back. Someone was watching him. Stealth was not a preferred art of his by any means, but he had been ambushed enough in a variety of ways to develop some senses in that regard. Growing up with Loki had been…instructive.

Normally, he would stand up and demand the watcher come to face him, violently if he felt it necessary, but this was a different normal. _Vain, cruel, greedy_. He could not do things as he’d done before. He would not.

Instead, Thor stood, and walked to a secluded gap between two buildings. Whoever was watching him could confront him there. It was a decision he regretted almost as soon as he walked into the alley; the refuse stored there smelled quite strongly. He’d smelled worse, though, and so he held position and waited for the watcher to come to him. The wait was longer than he expected, but there were so many tall buildings around him and so many places he could have been observed from. Or perhaps his watcher was simply deciding how and whether to take Thor’s invitation and confront him.

Then Agent Barton appeared at the end of the alley, cool predator’s eyes on Thor, but a smile on his lips. “There you are, man,” he said. “We thought we’d lost you.”

So he had been the watcher, then. Thor could hardly claim himself surprised. Generous or not, the Shield could not afford to be incautious with him. More than they knew. “It was not my intention to evade your custody,” he said.

“We know,” the Lady Natasha said, appearing at Barton’s side. “Accounting error.”

They had sent the most capable of their agents to retrieve him. Barton’s prowess Thor had heard of from the man’s own mouth, and he believed it. Lady Natasha, on the other hand, reminded him a lot of Sif in her grace and strength, and a little of Lady Amora in her awareness and use of her own beauty. If he were not human, he should not fear them. As matters stood, he did not doubt that they would prove able to subdue him and return him to the Shield. But Barton, at least, had sacrificed a position from which he could have slain Thor to speak to him instead. Thor would be a fool not to see the hand extended there. Again. “I meant only to make purchases,” he said. “My - a companion of mine told me many times in such situations that I should observe first and act after, particularly where coin or honour is involved.”

He tried to imagine Loki’s expression at hearing his words, and couldn’t picture it. Would he be pleased? Amused? The thought…bothered him. And it hurt. He shoved it aside.

Barton smiled wider. “Smart,” he said. He looked at his own companion, watchful at his side. Thor looked forward to testing her in the sparring ring. “What do you say we help him out, Nat?”

Lady Natasha, cool without being cold, said, “I don’t see why not.”

“Great,” Barton said. “Shopping 101 it is.”

He led the way, explaining the layout of the city as they went, at one point ducking into a tunnel that housed metal conveyances to transport many people. Thor watched carefully as Barton purchased them all tickets. They travelled on this ‘subway’ for a scant few minutes before disembarking again. When they emerged back into the sunlight, Barton explained to him where they were in relation to the first tunnel. The streets were measured in units called ‘blocks,’ it seemed. Once again he missed flying. It was so much easier to see where you were going, and you got to enjoy the city besides.

“Not that place,” Lady Natasha said abruptly, as they approached a building that looked much like any other. They were in a part of the city that seemed to sell more food, all of it cooked. Thor could smell oil in the air, and from one shop, the sharp scent of the delicious coffee he had tried in Puente Antiguo. “Their pizza’s terrible.”

“Aw, come on. It’s an experience.”

“It’s definitely not food.”

“I’m shouting you lunch,” Barton explained, to meet what Thor knew must be a look of bafflement on his part.

“He’s planning to buy you a piece of greasy cardboard,” Lady Natasha corrected him.

Thor smiled and said, “Either way I’ll learn something.”

Thanks to Lady Jane, he knew better than to smash any of the crockery. He did as he had planned, and watched carefully as Barton used his own rectangle of plastic to pay for the meal. First Barton swiped the card through a machine, and then he entered a number. It was hardly security, but perhaps better than nothing. That seemed to be the entire process of payment. He wondered how Barton knew how much currency he had.

He asked Lady Natasha. “There are machines that will tell you,” she said. “Banks keep your money for you, and when you use the card, it lets the bank know to send your money to the people you bought stuff from.”

“I see.” It sounded inefficient. Thor would much rather deal with gold, valuables, and direct bartering. Particularly if he did not know they who oversaw this ‘bank.’ “Thank you, Lady Natasha.”

She waved a hand. “You can ease up on the thanks,” she said. “We’ll never get anything done if you say that every time we help out. By the way, you can just call me Natasha when we’re out like this.”

It was a shockingly familiar request. He had never even fought by her side, nor shared her company in such a way that would normally give him leave to refer to her without title. (As a prince of Asgard, he could refer to her as he liked, but it would be most impolite, and besides, he was no longer a prince of Asgard.) If he must, he would prefer to address her as ‘Agent,’ though he assumed there was a reason she had requested otherwise, and it did not _sound_ like the most respectful of titles. If she gave her permission, though -

“Or you could call me Ms Romanov in public, if just Natasha makes you uncomfortable,” she suggested, eyes boring into him.

He did his best not to show weakness. It was not difficult to see that Lady Natasha was a formidable and experienced warrior, and she did not trust him. “When we have fought together, perhaps I will be able to do as you ask,” he said. “But for now, yes, I would prefer to give you terms of respect. I apologise if my earlier address was lacking in that regard.”

For some reason, his words made her smile. It was a small expression, but he thought it might be a genuine one. “It wasn’t. Just old-fashioned and a bit conspicuous.”

Barton returned then, carrying the promised pizza. It turned out to be a kind of bread with toppings baked on it, and it was indeed greasy. This did not preclude it also being delicious.

 

—

 

After a few hours trawling a department store and a supermarket for the basic things their alien guest would be needing for at least the first few days - clothes, mostly, but also towels, bedding, shampoo, cleaning stuff - Clint had definitely come around to Natasha’s theory that Thor had grown up wealthy.

It wasn’t that he wanted lots of expensive, flashy stuff. No. In fact, he’d kept his purchases fairly minimal. He just wanted the things he bought to be good quality, and assumed that it could be made to happen. No thought about budgeting, no thought about having to leave stuff behind, just a quiet insistence on paying more now so he wouldn’t have to pay for replacements until he absolutely had to. He’d inspected seams and stitching and things like that to make sure that what he bought was worth the price.

“Old money,” Nat said quietly, as Thor paid for his purchases. “He’s buying the expensive things because they’re good or because they suit him, not because they’re expensive. Money is a tool, not for showing off.”

“Rich is rich,” Clint whispered back. “You keeping track of his spending?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Such a mother hen. He’ll go a bit hungry by the end of the pay period, but he’s not stupid. If he goes hungry once I doubt he’ll make the same mistake twice.”

They’d seen flashes of the other man’s temper, when someone cut in front of him, when the woman at the checkout turned away to deal with another customer without so much as an ‘excuse me,’ but he seemed to have the issue well enough in hand. He didn’t so much as speak unkindly to the offenders, though it looked like a real effort. With purchases in hand (Thor’s hands, anyway, since he insisted on carrying his own stuff), they returned to SHIELD and the shoebox the agency had assigned him to live in. “Now you can settle in,” Nat said.

Their new maybe-alien buddy smiled at them and said, “I thank you both for your generous assistance today.” He was a polite maybe-alien, at least.

“You and me in the ring tomorrow, big guy,” Nat said, as they left.

“I look forward to it.”

They hadn’t made it down the hall before their phones went off again. Phil again. This time, they were being summoned to a meeting higher up. “Fury,” Natasha said.

“Living up to his name?” Clint asked.

Natasha just shrugged. “Nothing to do but go find out.”

The director of SHIELD didn’t keep his office on the top floor. Too predictable. Instead, he set up shop several floors down from the roof, nice and close to the fire escape. If you didn’t know it was the director’s office, you wouldn’t guess. Fury opened the door for Clint and Nat himself, with a big broad smile. Behind him, Clint saw Phil sitting blank-faced in one of the chairs. Altogether? _Not_ a good sign.

“The gang’s all here,” Fury said, with something those who didn’t know him would say was good cheer. “Good, good. Come in. Sit your asses down and don’t say a word.”

They did.

“This has not been a good week for me so far,” Fury began, “I’d go so far as to say it hasn’t been a great week for planet Earth. We’ve had disaffected Russian inventors blowing up Stark Expo. We’ve had the Hulk tear up Rio _and_ Harlem. And what do I come back here to find? Coulson here’s been recruiting possible aliens who beat up half the people I sent with him, accounting accidentally made it a catch-and-release program, and then you two turned _that_ shambles into a pizza party!”

Clint kept his expression as flat as possible. “It seemed like the best available option under the circumstances,” he said. “We got him back here in one piece and without maxing out any credit cards.”

The glare he got for that was an epic one. “Given the current state of Harlem, I’m so glad I don’t have to explain a maxed-out credit card,” Fury said. “While you were babysitting, did you at least manage to discover anything of use?”

Nat took over from there, outlining everything she’d observed, on top of what Phil and Clint had provided in their reports. His apparent professional training and experience, the signs of a hot temper that had to be consciously reined in, what he’d said about his exile, her suspicion that he was a criminal -

“Great,” Fury interrupted. “He confirm any of that?”

“So far he hasn’t explicitly confirmed he’s an alien,” Phil said. “He’s been cooperative but not forthcoming. We’re hoping that will change over time.”

It was usually the slow approach, but Clint thought it was the right one. Hostility and suspicion would put Thor’s back up and make him more wary of speaking to them, and while he’d proved that he did poorly in captivity and idleness, he did seem the stubborn sort. Clint doubted he’d talk to them if they imprisoned him for what he saw as no reason. In the end, winning his trust would be faster, _and_ they’d get to keep his services. Fury, though, just said, “I’m _assuming_ that you’re hoping it’ll bear fruit before more potential aliens come along to potentially kick our asses for sheltering one of their criminals?”

Phil said, “There’s no way I can know anything different, sir. I’m just dealing with the person in front of me.”

Then Natasha said, “Director, I have reason to believe someone contacted Thor while he was in our custody.”

Fury whirled on her. “And you didn’t lead with that because…”

“It made him more cooperative,” she replied calmly. “Sir, I believe that if any communication took place, he was cut loose, not instructed to infiltrate.”

It was the first Clint had heard of that theory of Nat’s, too. But he had a lot of practice at keeping his face straight while she did what she did, just like she covered for him.

After a brief pause for consideration, Fury said, “All right. This is how it’s going to go. You three got yourselves involved in this, so now you’re seeing it through, while you help fix the usual clusterfucks we deal with here. Coulson, back to New Mexico. I want to know more about that hammer, not to mention how someone might have contacted a prisoner in our custody. Romanov, congratulations, you’re dealing with Stark. I want his eyes on the trace analysis, but keep him away from the astrophysicist because the last goddamn thing I want Stark to have is wormhole access. Barton, your application for the extra week of leave is denied. You can have ten days in two months instead. For now, you’ll stay local and babysit. There’s a lot of mess to be secured in Harlem. Show ET the ropes. Any funny business, bring him in and lock him up.” He looked around at them. Phil and Nat were also doing their best statue impressions. “Any questions? No? Good. Get to it.”

“Sir,” three voices said in unison.

Not the worst it could be, Clint thought. Behind him, Phil was advising Nat on something to do with Stark. Choice of taser, perhaps. Clint himself would have to call his wife. At least if he was going to be in New York, heading back home for the weekends or equivalent wasn’t out of the question.

Even if Fury had stuck him on what was essentially rookie-minding duty.

 

—

 

Jane had to say she was glad to have her equipment back even if the offer came with more strings than a marionette. It sucked that she was being monitored by the secret agent people again too, but she didn’t think there was much she could do about it.

In the meantime, she had her science, and it was going phenomenally well. Thor’s explanation, translated out of poetry, gave her a better idea what to look for.

“These machines are going crazy,” Darcy reported. SHIELD hadn’t been happy that Jane kept her on, but they had to acknowledge that at least they wouldn’t have to do confidentiality paperwork for someone totally new. “Or they went crazy. I can’t tell.”

“Those machines?” Jane frowned. “I hardly get a blip out of them.” Those were the ones that recorded the activity associated with the Einstein-Rosen Bridge appearing, or the Bifrost activating, whatever they called it. They’d briefly gone wild when Thor had arrived. That was the most she’d ever got from them. Occasionally they flared up. Nothing Darcy could describe as ‘going crazy.’

“Well, they sure went nuts over the weekend,” Darcy said. “Look.”

She was right, Jane saw, reading over the printout. It wasn’t even spikes of energy. It was an abrupt climb, not to the levels that she’d seen the day Thor arrived, but still significant. More like the ocasional readings that had drawn her interest in the first place. From that steep initial climb, there was a steady upwards trend in the readings until it was nearly at the levels that might indicate people and/or things could travel, followed by a genuine spike, higher than she’d ever seen, and then - nothing. Not a steep decline to mirror the first incline. Nothing. Everything went back to zero in an instant.

“Strange,” she said. It was very, very strange.

Technology. Thor hadn’t used the word, but his meaning had been clear. She was not measuring a natural phenomenon, but the workings of an alien device. It explained the abrupt, erratic spikes of energy well. Like opening a door, or starting up a car.

Yes, Jane thought. Like starting up a car, and she was measuring the noise of the engine from far away. The incline as the engine warmed up, and then it was getting up to speed, and the spike - what was the spike? Why could she measure this at all, when nothing had come through?

She looked at the final spike and the flat line afterwards, and had the feeling that there was much more going on out there than she could possibly know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for reading and for whatever feedback you leave!


	5. Keeping Busy

Tony was busy working on an improvement to his left boot’s repulsor when he heard the door open. “You know what the best part of not dying is?” he asked his guest, without turning around.

“More time in the lab?” a smooth female voice replied.

Not Pepper. Hello. He knew that voice. “Natalie Rushman,” he said. He didn’t let go of his screwdriver, not that he thought it would do him much good. Call it a security screwdriver. Better than a blanket, since you could make things with it, and it was pointy. “You come back to be my PA for real this time?”

“I have a deal for you,” she said. “A favour for a favour.”

“You came back to be honest!” He turned around. “That must be a first.”

“Not at all,” she said. “Honesty usually works better.”

Highly selective honesty, Tony would bet. The sort that didn’t really look any different from lies when you got right down to it. “That how you got JARVIS to let you in?” Honestly, he was surprised Pepper hadn’t asked JARVIS to keep her _out_.

“That, and I asked nicely.”

Tony considered her. Even when she was doing her PA act she’d been somewhat reserved. When she was wearing her secret agent hat, she was inscrutable. So he called for someone who saw more than him. “JARVIS, is she telling the truth about that?”

“Indeed, sir,” JARVIS replied. “Agent Romanov outlined her business proposal to me. It was my judgment that you would be interested. She also used the word ‘please’.”

“It never pays to be rude to anyone who has the keys to the building or the master appointment book, let alone both,” Agent Romanov said.

“Spy lessons. Neat.” She wasn’t getting any closer while he was holding the screwdriver, that was for sure. She was being a non-threatening super spy today. Tony was not finding it very reassuring, and therefore he had no intention of putting down the screwdriver. “So, interesting business proposal. Let’s hear it.”

She reached into her handbag and withdrew two folders. “I have some substance analysis you might be interested in. Trace elements only. Our techs haven’t seen anything like it before, and they thought you’d be the best person to analyse them.”

“I am very vulnerable to flattery,” Tony said. Not to mention vulnerable to science. He wanted that folder. Which was the whole point. Damn. “What’s the catch?”

“We need you to make a certain proposal to Thaddeus Ross,” Agent Romanov said. The second folder, she pushed towards him. He opened it to find some briefing notes and two nice shiny military records. “We’re looking at Emil Blonsky for the Avengers Initiative. Ross has to approve him before we can make any headway. You’ve met him before. We believe it would be best coming from you.”

The very Avengers Initiative they’d rejected Tony from for not playing nicely enough with others. Even he could see a lack of tact there. He was about to mention it when Romanov withdrew a single sheet of paper from the other folder, the one with the science in it, and slid that over to him. It looked like a rundown of a _hair sample_ , of all things, which was - _hang on_. His eyes caught on some question marks and chemical notation. There were things on that hair sample that did not belong on a hair sample. “Did you want any analysis done in particular?” he asked. “Aside from the fact that whoever donated this is a natural blonde?”

“Whatever you can get,” she said. “If you want the original sample, we’ll get it for you - after you meet with General Ross. There’s also a blood sample.”

Well. If there was a blood sample too. How could he resist? “JARVIS, put a call through to General Thaddeus Ross. I need to meet him as soon as possible.” Since he still had the Stark Industries magic associated with him, it wasn’t long at all before the good general had put him in his calendar. Nor would he have long to wait - he’d managed to get a lunch date for the very next day. It never paid to be rude to the person with the master appointment book, after all.

At least Romanov had the decency not to gloat. “The samples will be delivered by the time you get back from your meeting,” she said. “I’ll debrief you. A warning in advance, the blood comes with a restriction. The donor asked that it only be used to help identify them.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “And part of identifying this person would be building up as thorough a profile of their health as possible.”

“If we can’t identify them by other means, yes,” Agent Romanov said.

Even more interesting. Big Brother _didn’t_ know everything, and they were coming to him for help. But Tony could be magnanimous too. He could hold off on his own gloating. “You never know what genetic markers might turn up,” he said. “Thank you, Agent Romanov, a very interesting proposal, but I now have a hair care regimen to analyse, so…”

“I’ll show myself out,” she said.

He barely even noticed her go. In fact, if it wasn’t for JARVIS, he probably wouldn’t have made his meeting with Ross the next day. The meeting didn’t go so well if they wanted to recruit Blonsky, but no skin off Tony’s nose, and he got a nice new bar out of the deal too. Tony could call that a win.

As promised, Romanov was waiting for him when he got back. There was something a bit different about her today, and it took a bit of effort to see it. A thicker layer of makeup on her left cheekbone. Hiding a bruise, Tony would bet. He knew a bit about hiding bruises; the suit wasn’t always the smoothest ride. Romanov noticed where he was looking, and said, “Training mishap. Nothing serious. How was the meeting with Ross?”

“Oh, you know how these things go,” he said breezily. He wanted that blood sample. Biology wasn’t his strong point, but he’d spent the previous day learning what he could, and he could already tell that there was some _strange_ stuff on the hair sample, even stranger than he'd thought at first. If the blood was anything like it - and if it wasn’t he didn’t know why SHIELD would want him to look at it - this really could be interesting. “I asked nicely, he got all upset for some reason, I bought the bar we were in out from under him.”

The world’s tiniest smile twitched at the corner of Romanov’s mouth, before it was quickly smothered. “So you were unsuccessful, then?”

“I wouldn’t say _that_ ,” he protested. “I got a new bar. SHIELD can drink free there. That’s something. Might need a bit of remodelling first though.”

“But no Blonsky.”

“No Blonsky. Not that _that’s_ much of a loss if you ask me, apparently they’re calling him the Abomination now on the news, doesn’t exactly have that nice heroic ring to it…ah, son of a bitch, you wanted me to needle Ross into refusing, didn’t you?”

It wasn’t even the world’s tiniest smile on Romanov’s face anymore, just a blankness that didn’t look _quite_ as icy as before. Secret agent humour, Tony thought, but at the same time it made her seem much more human again, rather than some avatar of dispassionate spycraft. “SHIELD decided to make the attempt to recruit Blonsky,” she said. “Agent Coulson in particular has a high opinion of your personal qualities beyond the Iron Man role.”

Wow. Tony hadn’t known he’d pissed the man off that badly. He thought Agent Coulson might threaten to tase people and put on _Supernanny_ as a matter of course. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Now, I held up my end, time to pay up. Strange blood, please.”

Romanov handed over a little insulated bag and the rest of the file she’d shown Tony briefly the day before. “We’re interested in whatever you can get out of it,” she said. “We’d also be interested to hear any methods you come up with to test it. We aren’t picky. We do require that the sample itself is destroyed when you’re done, since we promised the donor.”

Tony snorted. “And you’re going to _keep_ that promise?”

“We don’t see any reason not to, at this point.” Honesty was better, right, right. She thanked him for his services - for _tricking him_ \- and left.

Well, even if she’d tricked him, at least she’d left him a decent bribe. Tony had work to do. Maybe he’d even cut SHIELD in on every last bit of research on it.

 

—

 

After two days of working for the Shield, Thor hardly knew whether to feel more at home or more adrift.

The ceiling of his new room was growing familiar to him, as was the way to the desk he’d been given, and the view from the window. He had been introduced to several agents, and though they were not warriors as he had previously worked with, they were warriors still and he could learn to take up their cause. He had indeed enjoyed sparring with Agent Romanov, who had proved to be a formidable opponent. Agent Barton had continued to be most accommodating, though Thor knew the man was tasked with watching him for signs of disloyalty and violence as much as helping to adjust to his new life. He had obtained a ‘cell’ and sent Lady Jane the number; she had sent him a message in reply and they were to talk that very evening.

He wished to tell Sif of Lady Natasha and just how many women fought here alongside men (Shield had even been founded by a lady warrior, he had learned). He wished to buy Volstagg pizza and pop-tarts, introduce Hogun to Agent Barton, and Fandral, whose love of travel was second only to Loki’s, would no doubt delight simply walking the busy streets. There was more here on Midgard than he’d ever suspected there could be, and he wished to share it with them.

He also wished to spar with them on familiar training grounds and then visit their favourite tavern. He wanted to walk with his mother and hear her tell him of the latest dignitaries to visit. He wanted to hear his brother take off on another lengthy explanation on _magic doesn’t work that way, Thor,_ and then to drag him away from his books to eat and train. He even thought he might wish to hear another of his father’s lectures. He missed the towers, the sight of the Bifrost stretching to the horizon, the familiar stars…

Thor wanted to go _home_ , and no matter how he tried to focus on Midgard’s many wonders, sooner or later the thoughts crept in again.

“Do you want to move on?” Doctor Patel asked. He was in the service of the Shield too, not as a warrior but as a healer of sorts, one who specialised in treating unwell minds. Thor’s mind was not unwell, but he conceded that prevention was better than cure, and so he cooperated with this request too.

Doctor Patel had said at the beginning of their appointment that while he would keep as much of their discussion private as he could, in the interests of Thor’s present and future wellbeing, there were certain matters he was obliged to pass on to his superiors. Most of them had to do with Thor’s fitness to serve, including his commitment to the Shield.

“It’s not easy to put words to the matter,” Thor replied. “At the moment, no, I do not feel at home here. I will learn.” It would just take time, time in which he would still ache for his family, his friends, and Asgard. “Most people here have been very kind to me, more so than I deserve.”

Doctor Patel made a note of Thor’s response. “Moving to a different place is difficult at the best of times,” he said. “It sounds like you’re handling it well.”

It did not feel that way. Maybe that was another thing that would come in time.

From there, they moved to a discussion of the study Thor was doing, and how that made him feel. That, at least, was easier to answer: frustrated. “I feel my ignorance keenly,” he confessed. “I’ve spent more time reading in the past two days than I have in the past two years, I think, and every word I read just shows how much more I have to learn.”

“You don’t like book learning much?”

“I’ve always preferred to learn a thing by doing it,” Thor said. Problems never seemed to come to life to him until he saw them before him, unlike Loki, who could see them clearly on a page. “But as I am not in a position to decide how and what I should learn, I will persevere with reading.”

Another note was made. Doctor Patel would hardly be the first person to assume Thor stupid. There were a few agents already who had taken his ignorance for such. Though he would prove them wrong in time, the assumption still stung pride already bleeding from the many wounds it had been dealt over the past few days. He smothered his temper. It was for the best - not being taken for lackwitted, but the matter of his pride.

There were a great many other questions, mostly about his home and family, which Thor declined to answer as respectfully as he could. They hurt to think on, and Thor did not want to tell these Midgardians the affairs of Asgard’s royal family in any event. Exile he may be, but he would not betray Asgard by informing on her to those who might yet be her foes.

When the session concluded, Thor asked, “What happens now?”

“Now,” Doctor Patel said, “I make a report to Director Fury based on the things I told you I was obliged to share. The rest of it stays in my files, for when we next have an appointment. They’re regular occurrences, so don’t think anything of it.”

“And the substance of this report?”

Doctor Patel tapped his notes into a neater stack of paper. “I’ll be advising the Director that you be kept busy,” he said. “Not just with reading. The sooner you learn field work, the better for all of us, I think. I trust you’ll work hard at it.”

“I gave my word,” Thor said. Did they not understand that, here? “I will do my utmost.”

Aside from that minor matter, he was grateful. Almost pathetically so. From an unquestioned place at the forefront of Asgard’s might to practically begging for a humble place amongst Midgard’s warriors. He _would_ be grateful, fully and completely, because otherwise he didn’t know what he would even do here. This was at least a task of use.

He knew, because mere days ago he would have been opposed to these people, and he would have been wrong. Did Jotunheim have their equivalent to this Shield? Had Thor carelessly torn through frost giants who sought only to defend their homes and families from threats they suspected they could not meet in conventional means?

It was more likely than he wanted to think on. Yet by accepting employment here, Thor suspected he’d put himself in a position where he would have to think of matters from the perspective of -

\- of his _victims_.

 

—

 

There had been a time, not all that long ago, when Clint had avoided leave like it was the plague. And only took it when he had the plague or similar affliction, at that. That time was over, and Clint was sure it wouldn’t be coming back.

Laura had put the coffee on like she’d said she would. He could smell it as soon as he got out of his car.

He entered quietly, because he couldn’t hear Cooper, and if he was down for a nap he didn’t want to disturb his son. Or Laura. Cooper was the best thing in his life, but there was no denying that kids were tiring. He’d still be there when Cooper woke up, and in the meantime he and Laura could spend some time together.

Sure enough, he found his wife in her study, working on her computer, baby monitor by her side. “Hon?”

Laura jumped about a foot in the air, then turned so she could kiss him properly. “I’m glad you’re back,” she said when they broke apart, “But if you do that again, I swear I will put a bell on you.”

“It’s only overnight,” Clint said. “Work got a bit crazy and Fury denied my leave request. I need to be back tomorrow.”

“Stark Expo or the thing in Harlem?”

“Both,” he said. Then he considered. “And an alien. Or at least we think he’s probably an alien, or abducted by aliens, or something like that. We’re working on it. Nat, Phil, and I have a bet.”

“An alien,” she said skeptically.

“Yep. Maybe.”

“And you’re telling me this, which has got to be confidential, because…”

Clint leaned against one of her bookshelves, careful not to actually disturb the books. “Nat and I were talking,” he said. “She’s fine, by the way, she was on the edges of the Stark thing, came out without a scratch. Phil and I were dealing with the alien stuff.”

He told her everything, the hammer that landed in the desert, and especially about watching the man who came to get it, and how he’d battered his way through a full strike team of agents only to stop dead and surrender for reasons they still didn’t understand. There was confidentiality, but he trusted Laura, and this was important. It was important to _them_. “I called Nat afterwards, and what she said - it made me think. The world’s getting stranger, she said, and it’s only going to get worse. There’s other stuff too, I’m pretty sure that Fury believes it, and Phil. What they’re looking for, what they think we’ll be fighting in the next few years -“

Laura wheeled her desk chair a little closer, so she could take his hand. She knew what he was getting at. “I don’t want you to retire just to be with me and Cooper. I know what you do is important - _aliens_ , Clint, and from what you’ve said about Budapest -“

“As long as you don’t believe Nat’s account.”

“- If you want to retire because you’re done with the work, that’s one thing, but make sure it’s what _you_ want. I couldn’t bear it if you were here all the time but unhappy.” She smiled. “From the way you’re talking about maybe finding life on other planets, it doesn’t sound like you want to leave the work yet.”

“I just - if we’re right - I want us to know what we’re choosing,” he said. “The risks. Spacemen and Hulks are a bit different to the usual guys with guns. I only ever asked about how you felt about the guys with guns.”

Laura laughed. “And the women with guns. I mean it, love. Work for SHIELD as long as you need to, Hulks or no Hulks. We’ll make this family work in the meantime, and when you actually _want_ to retire, we’ll still be here.”

When she said it, Clint could almost believe it. Someday, though, if he kept this up, he’d start missing things like first days at school and piano recitals and baseball games and all those other things fathers were supposed to go to, and that he was finding that he desperately wanted to see. The only explanations he’d have to offer Cooper, and the other future children Clint wanted desperately, would start with their Uncle Barney, and they’d only get darker from there. Laura knew and understood, but he didn’t dare assume anyone else would. Part of him, the most cynical part, kept telling him that he couldn’t have his family and SHIELD. That wasn’t how his life worked. “Sometimes I feel like the worst husband in the world,” he said.

She used her grip on his hand to haul herself to her feet, and pressed right up against him for a kiss. “You’re really not,” she said.

They ended up knocking a few books off the shelves after all.

He also got a few hours to play with his son (and then wash the mud off him), and a cup of good coffee, a shared dinner planning the next renovation, and a night in his own bed with Laura’s warm presence beside him. All in all, pretty much a perfect day off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for your comments/kudos/bookmarks!


	6. For Science

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for animal death in this chapter. Nothing graphic, but it's more than a mention.

This time, Phil made it to New Mexico without running into any convenience store robberies, which made things easier.

What didn’t make things easier were scientists. Phil was now more experienced than he’d like to be at minding eccentric genuises, and while Jane Foster wasn’t at anywhere _close_ to Stark’s diva levels, he could spot a scientist who was going to insist every bit of equipment arranged to accomodate her from a mile away. She was a prickly one. From what he’d seen, her defensiveness only dropped around her associates and Thor. Foster was a small woman, far from physically imposing, and extremely attractive - Phil’s bet was that the defensiveness was a product of years of male colleagues not taking her seriously.

Not to mention, to be totally fair, Phil _had_ commandeered most of her life’s work just when it got successful. He’d justified the defensiveness in that regard. Still, you couldn’t have civilians punching holes in space and time, causing interdimensional security risks.

She was there when he arrived at their makeshift facility, chewing out a hapless tech. “No, the readings off the hammer are interfering,” she was telling the poor man. “It needs to be moved.” The device in question was a big one, with a fiddly-looking receiver dish on it. Phil had no idea what it did. He knew that if he asked, he’d get either a look full of disdain or a lengthy, honest, totally incomprehensible explanation. Either way, there was no point asking.

“Doctor Foster,” he greeted her, positioning himself so that Foster looked away and the tech could make a quick escape. “Is there anything we can do to help you here?”

“We need to move this dish,” she said, throwing a dirty look at the hammer still stuck firmly in its rock. “It was fine back at my workshop, but that hammer just causes interference with everything. It’s too close.”

“We can set you up closer to the perimeter,” Phil said. “Since we haven’t been able to move the hammer yet.”

Foster glared, first at him, then at the hammer again, and mercifully came down on the side of professionalism and continued productive science. “That’ll have to do,” she said. “Thank you, Agent Coulson.”

“Have you learned anything about it?” he asked, just in case.

She shook her head. “I’m recording the interference levels and whatever else I can get, that’s all. I could drop what I’m doing and learn more, but it’s not my speciality. Or I could give you a few names, people who might be able to help.”

“We may take you up on that.” SHIELD had scientists, good scientists, but no scientist specialised in everything. Stark was the closest to that Phil knew, and Stark didn’t mix well with the organisation. “I look forward to reading your report.” God, did he hope Foster could write a halfway comprehensible report. When someone had mentioned Stark’s reports required at least an engineering degree to understand, he’d started drawing ‘helpful’ illustrations in the margins. They’d had to ask Ms Potts instead. _She_ knew how organisations were run, and she could translate what Stark had given them. Despite her lack of engineering degree. It was a minor miracle.

His musing was interrupted by Dr Foster’s voice. “Actually - there’s something I can tell you right now,” she said. “Most of my instruments aren’t picking up anything anymore. They’re all in working order, there’s just nothing there to pick up. I don’t know why yet.”

Yet. Foster wasn’t short on confidence. She’d been right about the wormholes so far, so Phil couldn’t fault her for it. “Any theories?”

“There was a massive spike just before everything went quiet. Like something out there overloaded and blew out. I’m not certain, you understand, I could be way off base here. I still haven’t looked at everything properly.”

In practical terms, Phil had no idea what that meant, but he thanked Dr Foster anyway and went to start on his main task here. If someone else had contacted Thor while he was supposed to be in SHIELD custody, they had to know. Natasha was right about the change in Thor’s demeanour following that strange gap in the surveillance footage; he didn’t have the actual technical analysis of what went wrong yet, but the hammer remained a possibility. They didn’t have microphones but - and Phil sighed when he realised that it was going to be a long and boring task even just to review - it had been raining. People had been tracking mud everywhere. If there had been an intruder, they’d be no exception.

Time to delegate. He summoned a junior agent, one with some background in forensics.

“Shoes, sir?” Agent Turner asked.

“Shoes,” Phil repeated. “I want every bootprint that night accounted for, and the sooner the better.”

Turner was too professional herself to look overtly dismayed, but Phil knew she must be. Nobody in their right mind wanted to ask their colleagues about their footwear and spent hours upon hours zooming in on dirt. Turner nodded, and hurried off to get started.

It was a long shot. There had been a lot of people running around that night.

His own examination of that night’s footage revealed nothing. He went back hours, well before the storm, and forwards, just in case their potential mystery intruder had laid low. Nothing. Not in the base, not at the perimeter. Natasha was reasonably sure someone _had_ spoken to Thor that night, someone from wherever he’d come from, but if so they’d done a damn good job of staying out of sight. Phil wished they’d had the time to wire the base for sound, but they just hadn’t. The hammer would probably have fried that as well, anyway.

The next step was not one he was looking forward to. He was going to have to interview the scientists. And here he’d thought he might get away from eccentricity.

 

—

 

JARVIS was trying to get his attention. “Just a minute,” Tony said. He was fiddling with machine innards; he wasn’t getting the efficiency he wanted. It was a nice challenge, like the delicate work he’d done on his gauntlets and helmet. Similar principles, too, when it came to minimising vibration. What he _really_ needed was to separate everything, keep it away from the heavier-duty stuff he liked working on in his lab. “Just gotta get this worked out.”

“Sir, you’ve been telling me that for the past hour. Ms Potts is becoming quite annoyed.”

Pepper…Pepper! They were supposed to go out for dinner. Uh-oh. Tony put down his tools. “Is the reservation shot?”

“You have ten minutes, sir.”

“And the restaurant?”

“Fifteen minutes by car, which is waiting in the garage.”

He looked down at himself. He was in work clothes, read, a scorched t-shirt and old jeans. “You think they’ll let me in like this?”

“Sir, show them your checkbook and no doubt the owners will waive their until-now unspoken dress code. It will not be the first such venue you’ve purchased this week. Ms Potts may be less forgiving.”

“Nothing for it,” Tony sighed. “JARVIS, call the restaurant, let them know we’ll be late.” He’d go apologise to Pepper now and clean up a little. One way or another, he’d make sure they still had a nice dinner together.

He ran into her on his way back to his wardrobe, and yes, she definitely looked a bit on the unforgiving side. Not upset or personally offended, and he _knew_ it wasn’t her birthday or another date significant to her (he’d asked JARVIS to be far more assertive in that event), but his lateness was definitely registering on the Pepper Annoyance Scale. He forestalled it with words he still found difficult to say - “I’m sorry.”

She raised her eyebrows, but it looked like the apology was the way to go. “We both know you’re going to do it again,” she said, taking his arm and walking with him to the wardrobe. “I won’t get too mad if you don’t do it too often. My time’s valuable too. I want to spend it _with_ you, not waiting around for you. I’ve barely seen you in the past few days. What’s got you holed up in the lab this time?”

Not for the first time, Tony thought that Pepper was a far better girlfriend than he deserved.

“SHIELD had something for me,” he said. “At first it looks like boring old blood and hair samples, but look closer and you can see that whoever provided those samples has been _marinating_ in funky radiation. They’ve beeen where the sun does not shine. Literally. I have no idea what _is_ shining there, but it’s got to be something. Plus, I got teeny tiny amounts of product off the hair sample - conditioner, I think - and it’s not matching any product I can find. I can’t even identify all the ingredients.”

He started changing into a suit as he said it, still aware of Pepper’s eyes on him. Until her, he hadn’t usually let his girlfriends or nightly partners see him get changed; it felt weird and vulnerable, more even than being naked together. It was different with her. Not any less vulnerable, but like that vulnerability didn’t matter as much. “So…what does that mean?” Pepper asked.

“Well, it looks to me like SHIELD know a person who’s spent a lot of time on another planet, or something,” Tony said. “I need to check everything against the known effects of too much time in space. Maybe have a closer look at their files, too.”

“Another planet,” Pepper repeated, and Tony turned so he could see the look on her face when she realised. “But if you got ‘another planet’ from a sample of conditioner, that means -“

“Yep.” It was a conclusion worth holing up in the lab for, if not being late for dinner with Pepper. “SHIELD thinks they’ve found life on other planets. Life that values smooth, tangle-free hair.”

“Wow. That’s - wow. Aliens.” She stood there, dumbfounded, while Tony grabbed a tie. Tony could relate to the feeling. There was a little, five-year-old piece of him that was still jumping up and down, very excited about the aliens. The rest of him could handle it like a grown-up, by which he meant that he’d stay in the lab and study the _shit_ out of this, because aliens.

Admittedly, he wasn’t so much interested in their hair care technology, but he’d take what he could get. Romanov had said they’d made an agreement with the donor. They still had access to their astronaut. Tony could find them, and he could ask some more relevant questions.

“Okay, you’re officially forgiven for being a few minutes late,” Pepper said. “Unless these aliens turn out to be chestbursters. Then I’m going to be mad.”

Tony smiled and offered her his arm. “I don't think chestbursters have hair. I think we’ll be fine on that account.”

She scowled and shuddered, but then accepted the offer of his arm with tremendous dignity. “You better be right about that, Tony. I will remember, and I will hold it against you otherwise. God, that scene. So traumatic.”

Tomorrow. All the stuff he could do to find out about SHIELD’s aliens, he could do it tomorrow. Right now, he had a dinner date to keep.

 

—

 

The city of New York, Thor was now learning, was actually many cities that made up one larger city. Some few days ago, two great beasts had fought a mighty battle in one of those lesser cities, the one named Harlem. One beast was called the Hulk; the other, the Abomination.

Seeing some of the wreckage, out ‘in the field’ as they called it for the first time, Thor could see that the Hulk at least had been well named. Whatever creature had done this was large indeed. Buildings had been smashed and torn apart. Thor was tracker enough to see the work of massive, powerful hands in this, and the destruction where equally massive bodies had collided with walls. There were bloodstains, too, in places, and Thor wondered if the Abomination had perhaps been aptly named as well. A confrontation on that scale should not have happened in a place like this.

Beside him, Barton whistled. “They sure did a number on this place, didn’t they?”

“Which number would that be?”

“They wrecked it good.”

“Ah, I see.” Thor looked around. “Why?”

“The Hulk,” Barton explained. “He’s some poor sap of a professor who tried the wrong experiment, and now when he gets angry he turns into a big green man and smashes things up. An Army higher-up decided he wanted the Hulk and wouldn’t take no for an answer, but surprise surprise, the Hulk doesn’t want to be caged up and experimented on. The Army makes its own anti-Hulk weapon and here we are.”

Once Thor had parsed out the meaning - magic gone wrong, followed by careless attempts to contain the situation without regard for the victim of that initial mishap, had resulted in this fight - he shook his head disapprovingly. The Army, as he understood it, was supposed to protect these people. “Why are we required?” he asked Barton.

“Blood,” Barton said. “The science guys said that it can make people sick. Now that rescue’s mostly done, they need to get in here, take samples, and clean up properly. Hard to do when we’ve got this many people crawling over the place. They take care of that, we take care of our nerds.”

Thor nodded. He assumed ‘nerds’ were the same as ‘science guys’ were the same as the scholars and magicians of the agency. “You anticipate trouble?”

“Maybe,” Barton said. “We’re keeping people out of their homes and businesses and we can’t tell them exactly why. Sometimes it gets heated. You’ve shown you can deal with heated without actually killing anyone, and the Director wants my eyes on the ground, so here we both are. Let one of our people know if you spot any blood that might be from the Hulk or the Abomination - the Hulk bleeds a bit more green than humans, and the Abomination a bit more black.”

It was a sizeable task that would no doubt take days if not weeks. The destruction covered several blocks. Some buildings were destroyed, while others were untouched. He stayed a step behind Barton as the other man dealt with another group of lawkeepers, the ones who wore blue. He knew himself to be unqualified to negotiate in this affair, but he could do for Barton as he had sometimes done for his brother, and lend an intimidating presence to aid him. Not that he felt particularly intimidating, without his armour or indeed any armour worth the name. Nor did he have his cape. Nor Mjolnir. Mjolnir, he missed most of all. Still, he loomed as best he could.

Afterwards, when Barton had emerged victorious from his encounter with the ‘cops’, it was a day in the sun and the wreckage.

It was tedious at first. The nerds started at what seemed to be the terminus of the fight. Where Thor could relate to Lady Jane’s passion for the stars and see what it was drove her to learn ever more about them, it was hard to understand the same passion in the scholars muttering excitedly about the dried blood spattered on the broken stone. None bothered them, and Thor took the chance to read the site of the battle more closely.

There was less blood than he would have expected. When Thor ran his hand over the broken brickwork, he could feel the softness and fragility of his own human skin. It would take little force for this skin to split on this surface. The creatures who had battled here must have sturdy hides indeed. As he looked around more carefully, he could see that the more aggressive strikes showed black-red blood at impact, and green-red blood spattered a distance away. The Hulk, it seemed, had been on the defensive for most of the fight.

He had been a man of learning, Barton had said. A scholar who made a mistake. It was hard not to pity the man, whoever he was, and whatever had come from that error. Thor didn’t bother trying.

The responsibility here, he felt, was on the army. If they had to confront this Hulk for the good of all, it was their task to prevent the people of the city from being caught up in that fight. Yet it was their creature who was named Abomination, and their creature who had done most of the damage Thor saw.

As the day drew onwards, the sun beating down on the back of Thor’s neck, it became harder and harder to look past what it was they stood in. Homes and businesses, Barton had said, and Thor could not help but see the full truth of that. Here, there was a smashed picture frame in the dirt, showing a young woman in a strange hat, arms around two elders who could be nothing but her parents. There, there was the rotting corpse of a small fat animal bearing a collar, marking it as a pet of some kind. He found a long smear of human blood where one person had dragged another from the wreckage; he found a small, dented plaque commemorating the recent opening of a doctor’s clinic thanks to the generosity of the Maria Stark Foundation; he found children’s toys and torn clothing and small articles of jewelry.

It was hard not to think of how he’d thrown Mjolnir before, heedless of what was between him and his target, heedless of the structures the hammer knocked down in flying to or from his hand. The people of Jotunheim lived in its ice; he himself could well have caused destruction such as he surveyed here. Did Jotun children flee his arrival on that realm, forced to leave their toys behind? Did their elders run, forced to choose between their lives and the carefully built and accumulated trappings of those lives?

He didn’t know. He simply hadn’t thought, not beyond the image in his head of dangerous warriors who must be destroyed for the good of Asgard.

“You right?” Barton asked, as Thor bent to examine the third collared animal whose body he had come across. A different beast to the first two, but apparently domesticated all the same. “Geez. Poor kitty.”

“I’ve been in many battles, and I’ve seen how those battles affect soldiers, but I’ve never seen the aftermath for those who did not fight,” Thor admitted. “I’ve been writing down the details on these collars. It is meant to be identification, yes?”

“Name and address,” Barton confirmed. “We’ll pass it on to the relief people. You run into any trouble?”

“No,” Thor said. “No trouble.” Nothing outside his own head, in any case.


	7. Investigations

Tony was making progress on the science front, but there was more than one way to make progress when it came to investigating life in outer space. Hacking SHIELD’s files was a good place to advance the cause of his own personal knowledge of the situation, just while he waited for his tests to run. Whatever they knew, he wanted to know too. And then he wanted to know more.

“If I were a top-secret investigation into aliens who have mastered the science of hair care, where would I hide?” Tony said aloud, prodding at the databases and directories laid out before him.

“Sir would be wise to direct his inquiries to recent investigations,” JARVIS said.

“Thank you, JARVIS, while I realise that you may know more about this sort of thing than I do, being a computer yourself, I do actually know my way around. Especially when their systems are funded by the public service.” Good enough for government work was not good enough to keep out Tony Stark.

“My apologies.” Every folder containing documents updated or produced in the past fortnight highlighted themselves anyway. “As compensation for my overreach.”

There were times Tony regretted programming snarky AI. But those times were very rare and he only regretted it a very little. Mostly because JARVIS could do things like retrieve every recently-updated SHIELD file in a few seconds, snark or no snark.

Regrettably, none of those were labelled _Aliens!_ or similar. Not a pop culture reference to be found either. Maybe someone should have programmed SHIELD to have a sense of humour. It would be an improvement, he was sure. As it was, he flipped through file upon file on Harlem (Tony made a note of the Hulk’s real name, Bruce Banner - he was pretty sure he’d read two or three articles by him before), a whole bunch of interesting stuff about Vanko and Hammer, and then -

“New Mexico,” Tony said. “Jackpot.”

The New Mexico files were very carefully not mentioning the whole thing about outer space. You’d think SHIELD were hiding something, because the only thing in there were logistics reports and a mention of retrieving some object, a description of which was conveniently missing. Did it cost money to build a facility in the middle of nowhere? Yes it did. _Quelle surprise._

Then Tony frowned; why build in New Mexico? What was in New Mexico? Why not just bring their weird object back? Seemed like it would be both easier and cheaper, not that he was much of a businessman or anything. Why waste all the time and money hauling stuff to the middle of nowhere, better known (albeit not _much_ better known) as Puente Antiguo? Not that there was any hint of that in the files. Just expense reports. The most interesting thing there was a police report for a convenience store robbery, which in the most bureaucratic fashion possible, Agent Coulson had claimed as overtime with an extra invoice for having flour cleaned off his suit. That at least was so self-consciously dull it was almost interesting.

Almost.

“If I didn’t know better,” Tony said to JARVIS, “I’d think someone had made these reports extra boring, just to keep me away.”

“Having accessed SHIELD’s personal and psychological assessments of sir, I would estimate that this is a possibility of merit.”

“I knew it.” Nobody could be that boring. Not without trying. “So, what are they hiding? JARVIS. That’s your job. Let’s see you put some of that I in AI to work.”

“I _have_ always wanted to be a detective,” JARVIS said. “Very well, sir. I shall start analysing SHIELD’s files on the matter directly.”

“I’ll get you one of the detective hats,” Tony said. “Just as soon as you get something to wear it on. Maybe a pipe as well.”

Which freed Tony up nicely to go tune up his suit and fly over Harlem a few times. The centre of the wreckage was swarming with cops and the like, probably a few SHIELD guys as well, but there was nothing stopping him from having a chat to the civilians stuck on the edge trying to get back to their lives. Having a better idea of what was actually happening down there couldn’t be a bad idea either.

After that there were a bunch of other things to see to - a charity benefit, ordering flowers for Pepper (she was heading out on her first overseas business trip as CEO; he wanted to make sure she got something nice after a day stuck in a room with corporate assholes), a bunch of work on hooking his building up to an arc reactor, which had fallen to the wayside for a week or so, a bit more work on the next model of the suit. There weren’t enough hours in the day.

He was just thinking about maybe sleeping when JARVIS said, “Sir, I have finished my analysis of SHIELD files.”

When it came down to a fight between sleep and curiosity, curiosity won every time. “Yeah? What’ve you got?”

“I have confirmed the existence of a policy termed ‘Starkproofing,’ wherein everything of scientific or operational significance is kept off remotely accessible systems,” JARVIS began. “If sir wishes to see those files, they will likely be in the possession of Agent Coulson and Director Fury. Analysis of what remains would indicate SHIELD has built a small facility several miles away from the town of Puente Antiguo. They show no signs of relocating, ergo, whatever is there must be examined in situ. Expense reports indicate SHIELD is purchasing or relocating the appropriate equipment.”

“So basically, nothing.” Tony groaned in frustration.

“If sir will look at this expense report?”

It flashed onto his phone screen. More than any of the other reports, it was incredibly vague - it referred to consulting costs and compensation for property. No names, no specifics. “What’s special about this one?”

“Sir, the Puente Antiguo facility did not strike a populated area, and the landowner was compensated for SHIELD’s intrusion in a separate bill. There is little private property in town worth this amount of money, and only one possibility when it comes to consulting costs.” Another window opened on his phone, a staff page from Culver University. “Dr Jane Foster, astrophysicist, currently conducting field research in New Mexico.”

Tony read through the short list of published articles, eyebrows rising. From the titles alone, he was surprised she’d got them into journals at all. But - and it didn’t take much more than actually opening up those articles to read - her math was good. It was very good. “So, Dr Foster was on the right track with her wormhole theories, finds one, and then SHIELD swoops in, takes her stuff, and hires her to explain it all to them?”

“That is the theory I favour, sir.”

It was, however, just a theory. “Only one way to find out for sure,” he said. It was time for him to do his own investigating. He never had spent that much time in New Mexico. That was going to change.

 

—

 

“A moment of your time, Dr Foster?”

That was Agent Coulson, back again. Jane didn’t even know what he was doing here. She’d thought he’d gone to New York to sort out the rest of whatever was going on with Thor. So maybe he was just doing his job, and like Thor said, he wasn’t hell bent on being unfair to her, but he’d still taken her stuff. Even if he’d worked out something for her to keep working on it.

Jane grit her teeth, smiled, and said, “Sure. What is it?”

Agent Coulson met her smile with one of his own, crimped and thin. “We need to ask you some questions about Mr Smith,” he said. “Everything since you first encountered him.”

This was going to take more than just a moment. She couldn’t squash the apprehension clenching up her chest. She’d never even spoken to a police officer before, not like that, and this was way worse than just talking to police. This wasn’t getting pulled over for speeding or accidentally trespassing on private property. These guys were…she didn’t know, she was a scientist. Maybe Darcy -

\- there was no way she was going to be able to downplay anything. They’d be asking Darcy and Erik next. “I’ve got time,” she said.

Coulson showed her to the little office he was working out of, rather than any sort of interrogation room or whatever. “There’s no need to worry,” he said. “Coffee? Tea? Water?”

How reassuring. “Just water, thanks.”

He filled her a cup from the cooler. She didn’t touch it. “We know from the hospital records that you found Mr Smith when you ran into him with your van,” he said. “Could you describe the incident in a little more detail, please?”

“I didn’t see anything, if that’s what you mean. There was a storm. We were following the signals.” They’d barely been looking where they were going, to be honest. What was out there to hit? She’d been more worried about the storm, the first one she’d seen out here. Rolling the car had been second on her list of concerns. Hitting someone else? No. “He was…disoriented. I didn’t think anything of it. My assistant panicked and hit him with her taser.”

“What were conditions like that night?”

“Dark. Stormy. Lots of dust.” If there was one single, solitary silver lining to SHIELD having taken her equipment, it was that they’d had to clean out the grit from everything she’d taken in that van. Saved her the work. “Definitely low visibility.”

“No other witnesses?”

“Not that I know of. It was the middle of the night and the middle of the desert.”

He asked her about everything - had Thor been aggressive? (“At first.”) Rational? (“Hard to say.”) When she said disoriented, what did she mean? (“Staggering around a bit. He didn’t know where he was.”) What had Erik and Darcy thought? (“Scared.”)

He asked, “Has he told you anything about where he came from?”

Jane didn’t want to tell Coulson _anything_. She’d only spent three hours or so talking to Thor, but in that three hours - he’d listened to her. Hardly any of the guys she’d actually dated had listened to her like that, not when she talked about her work. She wouldn’t have expected it from first meeting, but he had. He hadn’t said much about his personal life in return, but what he had, he’d said sadly. To just repeat it to some smug secret agent felt wrong. She’d like to think she was a better friend than that.

So she did her best to keep a straight face, and said, “No.” She added, “He asked some strange questions when we picked him up from the hospital. He said he hadn’t been to a coffee shop before.” And even if she didn’t think the coffee there was much good, it was going to be hard to show her face there again.

If he didn’t believe her, he gave no sign of it. “Did he ask other questions?”

“Not much beyond our names,” Jane said.

More questions. Why had he decided to go to the SHIELD facility? What did he think of the trip? Did anyone know they were planning to go? How did he plan to get inside? Was he nervous about it? Confident? Had he asked her to assist in any way? Had she been afraid at any point? On and on and on he went, asking about things Jane hadn’t even considered. She hadn’t thought there could possibly be so much to tell. And yet he kept going. At last she lost patience - she still had work to do, after all, and even if this was on SHIELD’s dime she wanted to get to it - and asked, “What is it you _really_ want to ask me?”

Coulson looked her dead in the eyes and asked, “Was he alone?”

“As far as I know,” Jane said. “He hasn’t mentioned anyone and I haven’t noticed anyone.”

He sighed heavily. For a second he reminded her more of her ninth grade English teacher than a secret agent. He wasn’t angry with her, he was disappointed. “Dr Foster, this is a serious matter. I can understand not wanting to repeat to me anything confided in you, but if there was anyone with the man we now know as Mr Smith, we absolutely must know about it.”

“There was nobody,” Jane insisted. “The only people keeping an eye on us were you.”

The way he looked at her then, she knew he knew she’d held back the bits and pieces Thor had told her about his home. It wouldn’t do him any good anyway, she thought mutinously. What did Agent Coulson care about how this “world tree” worked? What did he get from knowing that Thor missed his home? It wasn’t exactly a radical hypothesis that someone stranded away from home would want to go back and be upset that they couldn’t. Not hard to work out.

Coulson stood, a move that wasn’t hard to interpret either. “Thank you for speaking to me, Dr Foster,” he said. “If you see Dr Selvig or Ms Lewis, let them know I’ll need to speak to them too.”

Just in case she was lying about something important. Jane nodded tightly and left. She still had work to do.

 

—

 

It had been a while since Natasha had stayed in New York this long. The longest stretch of time since she’d joined SHIELD in the first place, in fact. First Stark, and now the Harlem clean-up was going to keep her here for a little while longer.

At least she wasn’t on any full-time babysitting duties. She was better at investigating and infiltrating. SHIELD didn’t waste her talents.

“ _I_ heard that it just walked out of that fight,” the man to her left said.

Third bar tonight and all she was hearing was gossip. _Someone_ around here was making more serious inquiries about the Hulk’s location. Fury wasn’t having anyone undo all the work he’d done to let Bruce Banner get out of the country, and so, Natasha was haunting Harlem and adjacent watering holes, looking for someone looking for witnesses.

This was on top of her Stark-minding duties, but Stark had sent in a report right on schedule, full of scientific gobbledygook, well before anyone (read: her) had to chase him up. If anything he was being suspiciously compliant with SHIELD’s requests.

“You heard?” a second man asked.

“Yeah, I heard, right from my buddy. He saw it. He was there.”

“Your buddy saw it, huh? Your buddy found at the bottom of a bottle?”

Natasha kept an ear out. The second man was certainly curious. Not just about what happened at the end of the fight, but about eyewitnesses. This was the most promising lead she’d had all night. The first man, drinking hard, was getting a bit suspicious of the hard questions. “You a cop?” he asked eventually, and Natasha shifted on her seat so she could see the second man as he answered.

“Hey, fuck you,” the second man said. Just the right note of indignation, too. Pity for him that the first man didn’t buy it, and it went downhill from there. When the argument was done - forestalled by a firm word from the bartender - Natasha slipped out after the questioner. Following people on crowded streets was a thing she knew how to do well.

The man trying to find people who’d seen the Hulk leave started walking, and kept walking. He wasn’t a local. This was way further than most people would ordinarily walk to a bar, unless perhaps they were meeting friends. After a solid twenty minutes of walking, he hailed a taxi.

She couldn’t follow the taxi in another; that was a bit too conspicuous. New York traffic being what it was, though, there were other ways she could deal with this problem. She palmed a little tracking device, picked up her pace, and crossed the road behind the taxi. As she went, just as she got within arm’s reach of the taxi’s rear bumper, she pretended to stumble. The bug, which had been designed for exactly this sort of rushed attachment, stuck. Altogether, much easier than finding another taxi and conspicuously following them that way. Natasha called it in. The techs could handle this bit. They gave her directions and she followed, target still blissfully ignorant of her presence.

After all the insanity of Stark, the Hulk tearing up Harlem, and the alien, it was good to get back to basics. There weren’t many, if _any_ , people who were better than Natasha here. This, she could do, and this, she knew how to handle.

By the time her mark checked into a hotel, she was only three minutes behind him. It was the sort of place where they let in women (and sometimes men) who acted with a certain confidence and/or dressed in a certain way, so long as they didn’t say the words “appointment” or “client,” and so getting in was easy. Finding the right door was more challenging, but even that Natasha could do without much trouble.

Listening at the door wasn’t the way. Natasha headed up the stairs, broke into the room directly above her mark’s, and went out on the tiny balcony to listen. Lucky for her, he was speaking close to the window, the sound drifting up clearly enough to someone who was trying to hear.

“You’d think it would be easier to track the monster,” a different man to the one she’d followed was complaining. “It’s big and green and smashes things.”

“It didn’t pick the fight,” her target said. “As many Harlem residents are defending it as blaming it. Then it turned back into a man, and he’s not so easy to find. Then there’s SHIELD lurking around the area. They’re scaring people out of talking. Nobody wants to mess with suits who look like Feds.”

They knew about SHIELD.

That alone was worth all the work she’d done. People who knew about SHIELD were trying to find the Hulk. These men didn’t sound like army. Wherever they were from, it was less organised. Mercenaries at best.

“Tell me you didn’t try asking about Banner by name,” the second voice said.

“What do you take me for? An amateur? Look, I’m telling you, SHIELD’s ahead of us. They’ve probably helped the monster get out of the country. My contacts in the army said that they’ve lost track of it, and higher-ups are busy focusing on the other one anyway.”

They spoke only a little more. Speculation mostly. Plans for the next approach. The latter confirmed to Natasha that these were mercenaries. At last, though, one left, and then so did Natasha. She had to report in - there were people out there hunting not the Hulk, but Bruce Banner.

There weren’t as many reasons to try and find Bruce Banner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to everyone for reading, commenting, leaving kudos, or bookmarking!


	8. In Two Worlds

“Sir, I think you’re going to want to see this.”

While Coulson had heard many requests for his attention over the years, he never liked the sound of people telling him he’d want to see something. It invariably meant that he _didn’t_ want to see it, he’d just be much worse off if he didn’t. So he stopped what he was doing and asked, “What’s the matter, agent?”

No matter how bad it got, he couldn’t let the junior agents see him panic, either. Fortunately he had practice staying calm.

“It’s Mr Stark, sir,” the junior agent said. “He just arrived in town and checked into the motel.”

Coulson could have sworn a blue streak, if he was that sort of man. He was not. Instead, he calmly put his pen down. “Has anyone else realised that Tony Stark is in town?”

“He used his name, sir,” the poor junior agent said. Hayne, if Coulson recalled correctly. “It’s only a matter of time.”

That was quite unfortunately true. With Stark, you always had to weigh up whether his technical expertise and nigh-unsurpassed intellect were worth the aggravation. He was not the least conspicuous worker SHIELD had on its payroll. Not by a long shot. “Thank you for letting me know,” Coulson said. “I’ll handle it. Send me the details on my way over.”

He _hoped_ he could handle it. If Stark knew enough to come here, he probably knew enough to ask some very annoying questions. Natasha must be busy, and/or Ms Potts out of the country, because either would have headed that off at the pass. Nothing for it, though. Coulson tapped his papers into order and started the drive out to Puente Antiguo’s only motel.

If nothing else, at least there was the knowledge that Tony Stark would be dealing with the same, slightly grimy facilities as most travellers did. Sure, he knew the man had spent months in a cave in Afghanistan, but Coulson could still barely imagine Stark _choosing_ to deal with conditions less than five-star. Of which Puente Antiguo had none.

When he got to the motel, it wasn’t hard to see evidence of activity. But Stark wasn’t there. Coulson knew as soon as he saw the parking lot. No car there was anywhere near good enough for Stark. Yet he hadn’t passed a car that good on the drive here, either, and there was only one reasonable route.

That only left so many places Stark could be. Coulson pulled back out of the motel and drove the two minutes to Puente Antiguo proper. He only had to circle the block once before he saw it.

The car parked outside the diner wasn’t the flashiest Stark owned, not by a long shot, but nor was it one of the practical, dusty vehicles Coulson associated with the locals. It still probably cost more than most houses around here. Coulson’s first instinct was to worry about how it would hold up against the rough roads, but then remembered it was Stark, and Stark took good care of his machines.

There were other cars parked outside the diner, too. Iron Man Stark might be, but he could be taken by surprise, or out of the suit, and he rarely travelled out of the cities where he spent most of his time without a discreet bodyguard or two. They’d have the rooms next to Stark’s back at the motel, and they wouldn’t make themselves obtrusive during a confrontation as long as Coulson stayed nonthreatening. He knew how to do nonthreatening.

Coulson prepared himself for anything and went inside.

Stark was there, already holding court and basking in the attention of the locals. So much for keeping this quiet and discreet. Coulson positioned himself in Stark’s eyeline, and the man noticed him in a few seconds. Not much later, he’d gracefully disentangled himself from surprised visitors and come over, affecting a look of surprise. “Why, Agent!” Stark said. “What a shock to see you here!”

“I could say the same thing,” Coulson replied quietly. “What are you here for, Stark?”

“The desert scenery,” Stark said, without batting an eyelid. Impressive given what Coulson knew of his experiences in Afghanistan. A man in his position might be forgiven having had enough desert for a lifetime. “I’m usually more of a beach man, myself. Oh, and the little project you gave me. I need more information, and when I hacked your systems I think this is where to find it.”

But of course he’d hacked SHIELD’s systems. Coulson didn’t even know how he’d managed to extract useful information, since they’d gone back to pen and paper just to keep things secret from their own consultant. Or not, as the case may be.

Stark was still talking. “And the people here - like Joanne, you’ve met her, she makes _great_ pancakes - are telling me some interesting stories about what’s out there. They say it looks like a hammer, of all things, only nobody can take it out of the rock it’s stuck in. Very King Arthur. Or Merlin. You think if I move it, I can be elected president?”

“You could start a presidential bid even without that, Mr Stark,” Coulson said, “Though I wouldn’t vote for you. I don’t suppose you could be persuaded to leave?”

“I’m just tracking down a potential resource,” Stark said, all injured innocence. “I looked into people who might know a little something about something, and I got the name Jane Foster. Lo and behold, she’s out here looking into weird things in the sky. Funny coincidence.”

“I’m sure.”

“So you don’t mind if I look her up and have a chat?”

“Of course we mind, Mr Stark, it’s just that in the circumstances, stopping you is more drama than it’s worth.” Fury was going to kill him and Natasha for this. Don’t let Stark near the astrophysicist, he said. We don’t want Stark messing around with wormholes, he said. What a mess.

Only thing to do was to make the best of it. He excused himself and made a call, which would hopefully get Dr Foster out of the base. They didn’t want Stark playing around with interdimensional travel, but maybe he’d have some insight into the hammer.

 

—

 

Tony followed Coulson all the way out into the desert, where the only thing of note was a squat, mostly prefab facility behind high barbed-wire fence. So this was why desert tourism wasn’t a thing except in certain places. There just wasn’t much to see out here.

The SHIELD agents here were somewhat more alert than he might have thought, given the heat and the lack of, well, anything interesting going on. “They seem keyed up,” Tony observed, and Coulson only looked at him with a SHIELD-brand blank look. Right. No answers from secret agent man. Only mysteriousness. They kept walking. The layout wasn’t quite what he’d expected. It was like the facility was built…around something…

Seriously? They couldn’t move whatever fell from the sky? It was _that heavy_?

They passed through one final door, into the centre, and Tony saw it. “You’ve got three hours,” Coulson said. “We can’t afford to have you in town long. You draw attention. I have authorisation from Director Fury to carry out my last threat to you if you refuse to leave.”

And, oh, Tony knew he was being distracted, but it was such a good distraction. _Supernanny_ barely registered. They’d given him blood and hair to analyse when here, here was something even more incredible. Someone interested in low-tech weaponry could’ve said more about the hammer itself and the craftsmanship, no doubt, but it was the metal Tony was interested in. It didn’t catch the light like anything he’d seen before, and if they couldn’t _move_ something that looked like it should weigh a couple of pounds, max, there was something special going on here. He gestured to the handle. “Can I?”

“Three hours,” Coulson repeated. “Everything our techs have here is at your disposal, and we’ll send you through our own reports. Just about everyone in Puente Antiguo has tried moving that thing already.”

Tony wrapped his hand around the handle and pulled. Then he pulled again, more experimentally. It didn’t budge either time. It wasn’t like lifting something heavy, where he could feel the weight resisting his efforts. This was like he’d tried to lift all of Stark Tower - there was nothing his muscles could do to shift it.

Time for the suit. This was going to suck in the heat, but definitely worth it.

While various SHIELD lackeys got him their own equipment, Tony suited up and got to pulling the hammer with the full force of his repulsors, recording all the while, practically bombarding it with all the scanning JARVIS could bring to bear remotely. Coulson supervised, not quite able to hide his amusement at Tony’s failure to shift the hammer.

Two hours passed in a happy haze of experimentation, punctuated only by a bottle of sports drink. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Tony spotted a nervous-looking young agent sidling up to Coulson. In the space of a minute, whatever the younger agent said, Agent Coulson went from pleased-inscrutable to inscrutable-inscrutable.

“You get that, JARVIS?” Tony asked. Anything that could actually _change_ Coulson’s expression could be trouble. If he had to fight something, he wouldn’t mind another drink of water first.

There was a pause, and then JARVIS brought the replayed feed of the conversation up, sound enhanced.

“Sir, I’m done with the analysis you asked for,” the younger agent said.

“Executive summary,” Coulson replied, taking the proffered papers.

The woman hesitated, and said, “I found footprints that don’t match anyone on base.”

That was when Coulson’s face shut off. “Where?”

“In front of the hammer, sir. Nowhere else. I lost them after a few feet, and when I checked the cameras there was nothing unusual.”

So. They’d had a break-in, and whoever broke in got right to the hammer. That did explain why agents in the middle of nowhere were surprisingly on edge. Coulson didn’t say anything else, just looked through the report before dismissing the woman who’d brought them.

Anyway, it wasn’t an imminent threat, and that was the important thing. Nobody was going to be rudely interrupting Tony’s remaining hour with the alien chunk of metal, which was already showing up to be of a sort completely unknown on Earth and unusually dense. How had whatever aliens made this even _worked_ it? If this was the metal they had, no wonder their weaponry was still in the form of hammers.

He’d leave the aliens themselves to SHIELD. Tony was more interested in their stuff.

 

—

 

Thor was struggling with the appropriate form of Midgardian reports when someone called, “Mr Smith! A word!”

He was growing used to being called _Smith_. It still did not quite feel like his name, but with every day that passed it changed a little. Certainly, it did not feel so alien that he could not respond to it. He stood and headed towards the one who’d hailed him - a man with dark skin, shaven scalp, and an eyepatch. Nicholas Fury, the Director.

A man well named, Thor thought, for there was as much intensity in that single eye as most people could convey in two. Nevertheless he followed, even when the Director showed him into a plain office and shut the door behind them. “Sit,” the man said. Thor shoved aside that part of him that rankled at being treated as a disobedient hound, and sat. This man was his superior. Thor had bound himself to take reasonable directions. Sitting down was one such.

“I just got word from Agent Coulson,” the Director said. “It’s the strangest thing. When Coulson took a break from interviewing you that first time, there was a glitch in our cameras. We lost all vision there for a few minutes. Now we thought nothing of it, we put it down to that hammer of yours -“

“It is not mine,” Thor said.

“- _That hammer of yours_ ,” the Director continued, in a tone that communicated his desire to continue without interruption. “But then you suddenly change your tune during that power outage. That’s the sort of thing that looks a bit suspicious, Mr Smith. Almost like you’d been contacted by someone and told to cooperate, or something like that. But we had no evidence of anything like that except your demeanour, and so we decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

He left that hanging. This time, Thor thought he had better respond. “And you have such evidence now?” he asked. It would not be like Loki to leave such traces behind, but under the circumstances…he may have been less careful than usual.

“Funny you should mention that,” the Director said. “We’ve gone back through everything that happened that night, and what should we find but footprints that don’t belong to anyone, appearing in the same space of time as we lost our cameras. He leaned forward. “You’ve got one chance to tell the truth, Mr Smith, or I lock you up and we start re-negotiating with you with cell bars between us.”

Thor thought, fast as he could. “I was contacted,” he said. “On my honour, there was nothing said that affects the wellbeing of Earth.”

“Your honour?” the Director said, incredulous. “I’m a spy. Forgive me, but we have a little trouble with the concept of honour.”

“Forgive _me_ ,” Thor said. “But I am not, and my honour means something to me. I have pledged you my services in defending this realm, and I shall uphold my commitment, but I have no wish to compromise my former home. I can tell you nothing of what was said without doing so.” Odin’s death - the war with Jotunheim, his brother new to the throne - valuable information, and damaging in the wrong hands. If he told SHIELD, even so much as the position he used to hold, they would not stop asking until they had as many of Asgard’s secrets from him as they could get. “Nothing was said that would portend danger to Mid - to Earth.”

The Director narrowed his single eye. “The conversation was that sensitive?”

“Yes,” Thor said. He hated having to admit that much.

To his surprise, the Director nodded and leaned back in his chair rather than pressing the attack. “Agent Romanov thinks you’re a criminal,” he said, and then Thor understood this was just another type of attack. “You told us you were an exile. Are we right to assume that it was because of something you did? Or was it political?”

It was all he could do not to flinch visibly. He owed them what answers he could give. “It was both,” he said. “Agent Romanov is correct to suspect me of wrongdoing. I earned my exile by my own actions.”

The Director raised an eyebrow. “And instead of locking you up, you were sent here, where we offer you a good job. Doesn’t sound like much of a punishment.”

Anger rose in his chest. “I have lost my friends and family, all means of support, any hope of returning home, and was left here, one of the backwaters of the Nine Realms, to die where I could do no further harm,” he said hotly. “Think what you like of it, but this is one of the most severe punishments my king imposes.”

“You could do harm to us,” Fury pointed out. “We’d rather your king didn’t dump his undesirables on this planet. Not like he asked us about it.”

_Undesirables._ It was true. Thor sagged in his seat a little. “Yes. So I realise. I cannot do anything about it but what I have already done, and sworn to defend this realm. I will not be a burden on you.”

“And is that ‘you’ as in me and my agency, or ‘you’ as in all of Earth?”

“Both,” Thor said. “The one thing I will not do is give you sensitive information about my former home. We - they - have no interest in your affairs and pose you no threat.”

That single eye burned just as his father’s gaze could. “But just to be clear, you _do_ have sensitive information.” He stood and walked to his window, looking up at the narrow strip of sky between buildings. “I can tolerate a lot in my irregular recruits. Whatever sort of criminal you are, I guarantee I’ve hired worse. What I _can’t_ tolerate is not knowing which way my people will jump in a crisis. I believe you when you say you’ll stick with us when we’re only dealing with Earth matters. What happens if we _do_ come into conflict with your people?”

“It won’t -“

“Humour me.”

Thor thought of how careless he’d been on other worlds. All the smashed walls he’d left behind him even when he wasn’t fighting. “It will depend on the nature of the conflict,” he said. His tongue felt heavy, yet this was something he had to say, if he truly was committed to the defense of Earth. Earth was his new home, for as long as he should live. “If my people should trespass against yours, I will fight for you, save for one circumstance.”

The Director did not turn. “What circumstance is that?” he asked.

“If my king should involve himself,” Thor said. He would not fight his brother. Not in earnest. “I will not do anything to harm him. In that case, I will stand aside.”

Fury turned and glared at him. “I don’t like it,” he said, when it became clear to him Thor had nothing else to offer on that front. “I don’t like it, but it will have to do for now. Consider yourself on extra-tentative probation.”

“Very well,” Thor said. “What must I do to prove myself?”

“For the moment?” the Director said. “Just your job. The rest will come in time.”

 

—

 

When the working day was done - without the supervision of Agent Barton or Agent Romanov, or the severe female agent named Hill, SHIELD generally preferred it if Thor kept to regular hours and worked at his desk - Thor ventured out into New York again. The streets closest to SHIELD’s building were becoming familiar to him. He had discovered he liked the coffee from the store in a nearby alley better than the Starbucks, Thai takeaway better than Chinese takeaway, the tavern three blocks away better than the one across the street. He had learned the way to the nearest subway station, the names of the boroughs, and the structure of several Midgardian governments. He had learned the right sort of detergent to use in the washing machines at the laundromat and that he needed to make better plans with his money.

One day, and that day was drawing closer, he would know these streets near as well as he knew those of Asgard, and he would be able to handle his affairs here with as much ease as he had worked on Asgard. This was his world now, for the short decades he had remaining to him.

Jane had never been to New York, she’d told him, and the phone on which he called her had the ability to transmit images. There were ‘tourist traps,’ Barton had said, that he should see at least in passing, and which regardless of the name did not usually involve grievous risk to casual visitors. It had occurred to him that he might be able to share the experience to some extent.

His wandering took him to one of those tourist traps, the place known as Times Square despite not being at all square in shape. The people of Earth decorated their buildings with lights, here. Many of the light displays seemed to be advertising. Thor tried to work out what the products were, and searched for beauty and wonder in the intersection of streets before him. 

It was so _unlike_ Asgard. At this hour of the day on Asgard, the light would be gleaming off the buildings, turning them all to fire, then fading so that the stars were visible above them. This, this was a riot of mismatched colour, not so much harmonising with sunset and nightfall as fighting desperately against it, light bright as day wherever he looked -

Ah. He’d found it. Thor took the picture and sent it on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for reading!
> 
> Next time, a timeskip.


	9. An Aptitude For Stealth

Thor was not unaware that this assignment represented SHIELD’s growing trust in him. While he was frequently assigned to work under the supervision of Agent Barton or Agent Coulson, Director Fury trusting them to be capable of subduing Thor should he prove treacherous, this marked the first time he was to work _with_ another. Even if that other was Agent Romanov, the third person Fury trusted to overpower Thor.

Initially, Thor had wondered how Coulson could ever hope to defeat Thor in battle. He had asked, and Coulson had smiled in the way that reminded Thor of Loki. _I hear you’ve already had one run-in with a taser_ , he’d said. That was all he’d needed to say.

Thor was coming to respect the might of such a device as the taser. They were not honourable as Asgard reckoned such things, but the people of Earth were so much more fragile. They armed themselves with their wits, and why should they not? Their wits were what would help them fight against those greater threats. Thor had seen the might of the Iron Man, from a distance (another thing that Thor was not yet trusted to go near or to learn more about), and it seemed formidable indeed. He would very much have liked to fight it, the armour and the man inside it - but he knew that should he engage in such a fight, he would be killed almost immediately. Where once he might have fought on equal terms, now the Iron Man was beyond his capabilities.

Even after months it was galling, and no matter how he tried it didn’t seem to get much easier to accept. Agent Romanov was highly skilled, yes, and he enjoyed sparring with her very much, but she was _human_. Until he had come here, he had never been bested by a human before. That he too was human now was one of those things he couldn’t quite reconcile and adjust to.

She was in complete control of her every movement, confident in her strength and skill; Thor was still trying to demand more of his weaker human form than it could give him, and still trying to master his temper. And so she beat him. Six times out of ten, by his reckoning. Sif would laugh. So would Loki.

Such were the thoughts that flew through his head as she sent him crashing to the ground, attracting the attention of every SHIELD agent currently practicing. He stood and reset to try again, but after two punches Agent Romanov stepped backwards and said, “Too much aggro.”

He glared, but she was correct. He _was_ losing control of his temper. Again. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that his situation was not Lady Natasha’s fault.

“I apologise,” he said, after a few seconds. “I am fighting poorly today, but that is no excuse to take it out on you.”

“We all have off days,” she said. Her words were light, but her eyes were hard. They usually were. If he had learned something about Agent Romanov, it was that her trust and affection were not given lightly. Thor thought she might like him well enough - but he _knew_ she did not trust him wholly.

Another deep breath. “I will be poor backup for you if this continues,” he said.

“The idea is that I won’t need backup at all. It’s just a bit of information-gathering, in public and everything.”

“But should I be called on for such a service, I would do it right.” He stretched out, and admitted, “I don’t like aeroplanes. Another thing I ought not take out on you here.” Planes were diabolical contraptions. Cars weren’t much better. He didn’t know how humans could think so little of stuffing themselves in cramped metal containers to travel at high speeds. He never missed Mjolnir more than when he was required to travel somewhere by air.

“As long as you don’t take it out on the plane itself, I’ll be fine,” Natasha replied.

He managed to smile at that. “Again,” he said. “I will redeem my poor performance.”

He did not, not entirely, despite his determination. Failure was another thing Thor couldn’t quite seem to reconcile himself to. Agent Romanov instructed him to work off his “pre-flight jitters” elsewise. So he called Jane, from the privacy of his little apartment.

“You’ll like London,” she said. “There’s a lot of variety. It’s very busy. Are you going to have time to do any sightseeing?”

“Impossible to say. The last time I was on such a mission, I barely had the chance to sleep.”

“That was San Francisco, right?”

“Indeed. A shame. I had heard much of their bridge. Hopefully this will be a mission more like the one in Washington D.C.” He and Barton had once again been escorting people of interest to SHIELD, in a matter of significance that largely escaped Thor; it had involved a lot of waiting, but also time to investigate the city.

“I still can’t believe you passed up going to the Air and Space Museum.”

He laughed. “More your interest than mine, I fear. Perhaps one day we might be able to visit together.” It had been some weeks since he’d last seen her in person, when she’d come to New York to meet with a fellow scholar. Still, talking to her was engaging, to the point he couldn’t focus on his learned hatred of human means of flying.

At length, Jane said, “I do need to talk to you about something work-related,” and Thor felt a familiar little stab of homesickness and grief. Her work. His home.

“Of course,” he replied. He tried not to let his feelings touch his voice. He would not have her rein in her curiosity about the galaxy at large for his sake. “Ask as you need.”

“It can wait,” she said. “I just want to check a few things with you, see if I’m on the right track.”

“I shall do my best to give proper explanations if required,” he promised. He couldn’t tell her half as much as she might want, the gaps in his knowledge of Asgard making themselves apparent as much as his general ignorance of Midgard. “No poetry. Only science.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” she said. She hesitated, and through the phone Thor could hear Darcy singing along with her music. At last, she said, “Stay safe.”

Jane, Thor had learned, was not much given to sentimental words, and she preferred to demonstrate her care in other ways. Such a request from her was heartfelt indeed. “I will,” he promised.

 

—

 

The flight over was not an easy one. Thor hadn’t been kidding about not liking flying, and the usually-cheerful man was snappish and tense. For her part, Natasha missed Clint. He was her usual backup for this sort of thing. Either solo, or with his sharp eyes watching her back - that was they way she’d worked for the past several years. She didn’t like the idea of breaking in a new working relationship. But she was a professional, and she dealt with what and who she was given.

The bar they were staking out was on the rowdier side of normal, but nothing exceptional, which was the point. Always better to remain inconspicuous. Natasha went in first, since SHIELD used that principle as well. She went straight for a drink, seating herself somewhere she could scope out the patrons.

It was a few minutes before she spotted the first Banner-hunter, the mercenary from New York. He was in a corner, drinking and waiting. Natasha set up to do the same. They’d never been able to determine what these people wanted Bruce Banner for. Fury had a bad feeling about it, at least. When it came to the long term, Natasha trusted Fury’s instincts.

She didn’t necessarily agree that letting the man who could become the Hulk just roam wherever he liked was the best idea, but she wholeheartedly agreed that nobody could be trusted with the Hulk’s power.

Forty minutes afterwards, a tall, lean man in a grey business suit entered, totally unremarkable except for the fact he immediately looked around the bar, and his gaze landed on Natasha’s mercenary. Then he ordered his own drink and sat at his own table, studiously not looking at her mark again. He stayed there, not moving. The mercenary made no moves towards him either. The bar was still quiet, though.

That was when Thor came in. In minutes, most every patron in the bar was trying to explain cricket to him. Just as planned. Thor wasn’t much of a liar, and he didn’t know a lot about actually, purposefully, extracting information from people, but he made a good distraction, nobody would pick him as a SHIELD agent at first glance, and he had a real knack for getting people to drink, chat, and focus on him. If all else failed, he was to cover her escape however he thought fit.

More importantly, with Thor running an impromptu party, nobody was looking at Natasha or her targets, not even in passing. Sure enough, the mercenary approached the suit once the activity in the pub was pointed in a different direction, sliding into the seat opposite. Natasha got into a better eavesdropping position by pretending she needed to find the bathroom.

“- lost him at the docks,” the mercenary was saying, as Natasha drew near. “The Italian authorities didn’t know of him. Probably traded cheap medical treatment and deckhand work for passage on a boat somewhere.”

This was indeed how SHIELD thought Banner had made it to Turkey; for a sheltered academic, Banner had turned out to be surprisingly wily and resourceful on the run.

“He is a doctor,” the suit snapped. Fluent English, but the slightest hint of a German accent. “You are proving to be less effective than we would like.”

We. Interesting.

“You try getting information about where he went from a guy whose broken arm he set, or an old lady he taught to use a cane right. He’s smart and he’s cautious. No calls to any of his science contacts, and he doesn’t stick to the cities either.”

That, and Fury had had quite enough of these guys chasing Banner, and instructed Natasha to throw them off. Banner got away, while SHIELD got to follow the interested party back to their boss, and here they were. While the mercenary knew about SHIELD, they hadn’t been able to spot her work.

“Nevertheless,” the suit said. “We do have need of someone who can actually complete this assignment. Consider your contract terminated as of now. Half payment, as agreed.”

The suit stood and made to leave. Natasha made to follow in her turn, giving her temporary partner the signal that he should stay on the mercenary. If it were Clint, she wouldn’t even have to. He’d know. New partners were the worst. As she headed out the door, she heard the mercenary drawn into the cluster of people chatting around and to Thor.

Natasha was familiar with London, and it helped her keep tabs on her target, who was _also_ clearly familiar with the city and experienced with throwing off potential trails. Not good enough to get past her, but pretty good. He was patient, at least, and didn’t lead her straight back to his ultimate destination, instead visiting a second bar and walking through evening theatre crowds. It was past midnight when he finally arrived at a small terrace house in an unremarkable London suburb.

She checked her phone from time to time, keeping tabs on Thor, instructing him to meet her here, because four eyes were far better than two for this sort of work. No slipping out the back for the suit - and if he did, one could keep following while the other searched his things. Or Thor could spell her while she rested and vice versa.

It took him a while to arrive, and when he did he smelled strongly of beer. “An accident,” he told her. “I am sober. What do you need of me?”

“Stay here and keep an eye on the door,” she said. “If he leaves, I want to know.”

He nodded. “I will do my best, though I warn you, I have done little hunting in cities.”

“It’ll have to do. Just stay out of sight.” He was straightforward, not stupid, and though he preferred action, he’d take instructions if he saw the reason for them. He could handle this fine. “Where _have_ you hunted before?”

“Forests, mostly, though my friends and I once brought down a mighty hill giant,” he said. He smiled. “I’ll just think of the buildings as trees. It can’t be that much harder.”

A hill giant. Of course. Natasha filed away the unexpected bit of personal detail - Coulson would be pleased to know that trusting Thor was indeed inducing him to trust them in return - and focused back on the more immediate task. “It’s the same general idea,” she agreed. “Call me if you see anything.”

She took the more challenging job of moving to a new and equally secure position herself. Same general idea or not, she’d do this bit herself. Natasha, for her part, made her way around the terraced row to the back. Spying on terraced houses with short notice was the worst. Anything could happen while you made your way _all_ the way around. Or, in the worst cases, over. With notice, of course, it wasn’t usually too challenging to break into an adjacent house, or just get some decent bugs in.

Natasha was just rounding the last corner when Thor said, “The man from the tavern is leaving.”

Oh, shit. Decision time. Did she follow - or did she search? “Follow him,” she said, making the snap call. “Don’t let him know you’re there. I’ll catch up.”

As much as Thor had learned, he was still an alien. He wouldn’t even know what he was looking for in terms of intel. She’d just have to hope that he’d learned a bit about what she and SHIELD did.

 

—

 

It was Agent Romanov’s right to give him orders, Thor reminded himself. She was his superior here. And he would keep reminding himself. If this had been Asgard, he would not have thought kindly of a foreigner taking control of a task vital to Asgard’s security. He was no longer a prince. He was a warrior same as other warriors, little more than a prisoner, and still with SHIELD on sufferance.

As he hurried out after the man Agent Romanov had been tracking, he thought he might also owe Loki an apology. The tricks of stealth Thor had once disdained were now proving difficult to learn and use, though he’d been trying. Though he did not make the same mistake twice, little good that was when there were always new mistakes waiting to reveal themselves, and vanishing was harder than Loki had always made it look. With or without magic.

Right now, Thor would settle for inconspicuous. It was quiet on the streets now. If he was spotted, it would be immediately revealing. He would not ruin this mission. He would _not_.

The man he was following checked behind him every so often. So far Thor had contrived to stay out of sight, behind fences or the boxes humans put their mail into. He felt clumsy as a bilgesnipe, and just about as obvious. This was not like hunting in a forest at all. He missed Mjolnir all over again, as he did so often. This would be so much easier from the air. Or with Hogun by his side.

The small houses in their rows became shops again, all shut up for the night. Thor followed carefully, wary of the cameras he knew sometimes filmed the streets.

He didn’t like this. Why was this man seeking an even more secluded location?

Thor just had time to realise that this was deeply suspicious before he turned one last corner, and then had to dive out of the way as the man he had been following swung a heavy-looking baton at Thor’s throat.

_At last, a fight!_ warred with the impulse to shout every curse he knew. This was not unsalvageable. Impossible to complete as he’d been instructed, but not unsalvageable.

“You’re much less skilled than I expected,” the man said.

The words stung, not least because Thor knew they were true. He had a task to complete, however, and this man was no Natasha Romanov. If he were, Thor would be dead. Thor sprung right back up, closed the distance between them, and caught the second swing of the baton. Then he pushed back, and heard the man’s arm break, still easy enough to do with mortal strength. Humans really were so very fragile. “Am I?” he asked, unable to resist, and the only response was a shout of pain. Thor knocked him out, and that was that.

Not much of a fight after all. A pity.

Then he had to call Agent Romanov. She picked up quickly. “Is there a problem?” she asked.

“He spotted me,” Thor said. “Then he attempted to kill me.”

“Dead or unconscious?”

“Unconscious.”

Natasha sighed heavily. “Restrain him and get both of you out of sight. I’ll call for extraction.”

Thor nodded sharply, remembering too late that she couldn’t see him. Earth technology. So frustrating sometimes. “I apologise for my error,” he said.

“Looking at what they’ve got here, they knew we were on to them anyway, in a general sense,” Natasha said. “Don’t beat yourself up too badly about it. Plans change.”

Easy enough for her to say, Thor thought, as he went about cleaning up his mess. SHIELD would be able to get something from this man, surely. For him, though, it was another failure he’d just have to learn from. He was doing a lot of learning, on Midgard.

 

—

 

Even knowing Thor had been spotted, Natasha knew she’d made the right choice. There was no way Thor would have understood this, and this was important. Whatever had made their target leave - a tip-off, perhaps? But from whom? - he hadn’t had time to take all his stuff. Tired from the chase and panicking, he’d left his laptop. Unlocked.

She hadn’t had time to read through everything, but she thought she might know why these people were looking for Bruce Banner now, and it had nothing to do with the Hulk.

It had everything to do with the object known as ‘the Tesseract’, lost at sea with Captain America seventy years ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turns out that 'timeskip' also refers to me skipping chapter updates. Sorry!


	10. Leaving

Things had calmed down a bit since that hectic week almost six months ago. Stark had been keeping busy with his engineering projects - Stark Tower was going to be powered by arc reactor within the next six months, so Coulson heard - and his continued one-man privatisation of world peace; Bruce Banner was clear of pursuit for the time being; and no aliens had turned up to demand the intergalactic extradition of the man known to SHIELD as Thor Smith. Even Barton and Romanov were keeping their hijinks to a minimum. Nothing had crashed from the sky, blown up major public events wearing impossibly advanced technology, or broken into SHIELD facilities before vanishing without a trace. All urban destruction caused in the last few months had been strictly conventional.

Director Fury thought it was too good to last, and Coulson had to agree. This was the calm before the storm, or a calm between two storms, but the important thing to remember was that there was another storm coming.

The look on Natasha’s face as she and Thor got off the plane was a good reminder. You’d have to know her well to spot it. There weren’t many she allowed to know her that well. Whatever had happened, she was worried about it.

“Successful?” Coulson asked, eyebrow raised.

“Moderately,” Natasha said.

“London was most interesting,” Thor said, smiling broadly. “And I do enjoy a fight, even one so poor as what our captive offered.”

Coulson had seen the preliminary report from their extraction team. The injuries had been a broken arm and a concussion, neither of them suffered by Thor. “I’m not sure that counts as a fight,” Coulson said.

“If there’s a blackjack involved, it’s a fight,” Natasha said. Thor laughed and clapped her on the back, and Coulson was surprised to see that Natasha allowed it. But then, Natasha _did_ trust Thor enough to spar with him regularly (since he was the only person SHIELD had who could consistently challenge her in hand-to-hand), and she’d had ample opportunity to work him out. She might not trust his read of a situation or his loyalties to Earth, but it seemed she trusted him not to hurt her.

Natasha was the sort of person who’d never had as many friends as she’d needed. He was glad she had another.

Once the usual post-mission flurry of activity was under way and she’d distracted her temporary partner with work, Natasha took him aside. “I need to speak to you and Fury before anyone interrogates the prisoner,” she said quietly. “This is more serious than we thought.”

Natasha took everything seriously, but didn’t spook easily. “I’ll set it up,” Coulson promised. They all had codes that would get them past Fury’s secretary. “You didn’t tell Thor?”

Natasha shook her head. “Not until Fury allows it. If he allows it.”

“It’s that serious?”

“It’s that serious.”

A chill went down Coulson’s spine. The other shoe. He didn’t know what it was yet, but this could be it. He called Fury directly and received instructions to _get your asses over here right now, then_.

It took two hours. Fury wasn’t best pleased at the delay. “So what is it, Agent Romanov?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

“I found our prisoner’s laptop,” she said. “I did some preliminary reading. The short version is, he and his associates think of themselves as neo-Hydra. They’re looking for something called a ‘Tesseract’ that apparently went into the ocean with Captain America back in the forties. That’s why they want Banner. They think he might be able to track it somehow.”

It was embarrassing, but it was a struggle to contain his excitement. Captain America! A career of covert operations hadn’t cured him of that frisson of excitement. This time the excitement was tinged with a little more sadness. Captain Rogers had deserved better.

“And are they right?” Fury asked.

“You’d know about Banner’s skills better than I would, sir. But they certainly think Banner might be able to work something out. They’ve got a search area outlined where they think Rogers’ plane might have drifted over the years.”

That was a worrying level of detail, for a group that hadn’t been on SHIELD’s radar until Harlem. “Neo-Hydra?” Coulson asked. “How organised are they?”

“I can’t make a good estimate of that yet. Enough to hire mercenaries, even if they’re not the best, and get some expert opinions. They’ve put a decent amount of money and effort into this, from what I can tell.”

“Enough to start looking into underwater recovery?” Fury again. He’d tilted his chair back forward to listen.

“I’m not a forensic accountant and I haven’t read through everything on that computer anyway.”

Much like Natasha, most people found Fury inscrutable. And unlike most people, Coulson knew Fury well enough to tell when the man was thinking hard anyway. Leave this ‘neo-Hydra’ alone, maybe restricting themselves to running a few rings around them to make sure they stayed harmless at most, or go root them out wherever they were hiding? He didn’t think Natasha knew what the Tesseract was, but Coulson did. It might not have been strictly _proper_ use of his security clearance, but he’d been curious. He’d been curious for _years_. Everything he knew about Captain America said that here was a man who would not throw his own life away for nothing. What could have been so important that he’d decided to sacrifice himself?

Strange artefacts of unimaginable power, as it turned out. Coulson had to admit it was a worthy sacrifice, reading the reports of the Red Skull’s plan. Captain Rogers was a real hero. And if this neo-Hydra really did know where the Tesseract might be, Coulson wasn’t at all sure that it could be ignored.

At last, Fury said, “Coulson. You’re up. Find these people. See if they’re on the right track with the Tesseract. Romanov, you too, and Barton when he’s back from leave. If there’s anything to find, I want SHIELD to find it first.”

“Should we bring Banner in?” Natasha asked.

Fury thought for a second more and said, “Not yet. We’ll keep a slightly closer eye on him, but let’s all try not to annoy the man who can destroy a good bit of any given city if he’s angry enough. If you need scientific expertise, go to Foster and Selvig, see if they can track the Tesseract the same way first.”

When Fury dismissed Natasha, Coulson lingered a second. “About the Tesseract, sir.”

“You’ve read the Rogers file,” Fury said. “Why am I not surprised.”

“I see that we’ve suspected the Tesseract was of non-human origin for a long time,” Coulson said. “What if our extra-terrestrial guest knows something about it?”

“And what if he does?” Fury asked, steepling his fingers in front of his face. “We still don’t know where he came from, and I still don’t know if Earth’s his foremost priority. I’m not taking that chance. This is an Earth affair until proven otherwise.”

It was a sensible decision, Coulson thought. Cautious. He hoped it was also the best decision.

 

—

 

There was something going on that Thor was not privy to, something that related to the mission he’d just come back from. That was something it did not take much skill to work out. He’d been given lesser tasks, and he and Natasha had been debriefed separately. It wasn’t that unusual for him to be quietly kept away from tasks demanding trust, but he’d never been in a situation where his partner in a particular task had kept such a secret from him.

Whatever Natasha had found, it must have truly been important.

In the meantime, he had other things to occupy himself. Jane’s mysterious work-related issues, for one. Then, when they were done talking about those, perhaps they could move on to more pleasant matters. He kept that in mind as he finished his usual post-mission chores, filling out the paperwork people so rightly dreaded. He had enough of the cell ‘minutes’ to afford a call to Jane with visuals. That was what he would do.

Secrets aside, he finished up his work with something very like contentment. This had been a good day. A good week. The grief over his father’s death receded little by little, though the guilt did not. To his shame, he even missed his old friends less often, though no less sharply, and even his mother and Loki. Many things were easier to bear with the companionship of his new friends and difficult work to occupy him.

To his surprise and delight, Jane called him first, with the same idea he’d had. “You look well, at least,” she said.

“I was in but one fight,” Thor said. “It ended quickly, and I was unhurt.”

“Good.”

Thor had heard several of his comrades speak of their families. Midgard, he surmised, did not have the same attitude to death in battle as Asgard did. For several other agents, their deaths were prospects greatly feared by their loved ones. It had surprised him, then, that Jane, who was what Midgardians called a civilian, had shown none of that fear. _You’d be surprised at some of the places I’ve been to do field work_ , she’d said. _If you have to do dangerous things, you have to do dangerous things._ “And you?” he asked. “How does your work progress?”

“That’s what I needed to talk to you about,” she said. “Not long after you got here, I got some strange readings. Like the ones that told me where to find you. Only these ones climbed higher before cutting out altogether.” She stopped, and chewed on her lip for a few seconds before saying, “Thor, I think the Bifrost is broken.”

A chill went down his spine. “Impossible,” he said. “No weapon short of Mjolnir or Gungnir could do such a thing.”

“I’ll send you through my calculations, see if they make any sense to you, but what I think happened is that someone started it up and left it on, until the buildup of energy shattered it.”

“Impossible,” Thor said again. He saw Jane frown and he hastened to assure her, “I have faith in your calculations, Jane, but the bridge is guarded constantly by Heimdall, the Watchman. He is the only one other than the king or regent who can operate it. There has not been an accident since he took up his post.”

“Maybe it was deliberate,” Jane suggested.

Thor shook his head. “If you could measure the energy released from Midgard, then the Bifrost would have destroyed the realm it was opened onto.” He knew that much about the forces harnessed by the Bifrost. It would be catastrophic. He could not imagine the devastation. Who would do such a thing? And to whom? “Heimdall’s loyalty is matched only by his good sense, and my brother would have no reason to do anything like that.” If Jane was right - if Jane was right, something was very wrong in Asgard. This should not have happened. It should be impossible. Some dire emergency? But what was out there, in all the realms, that could threaten Asgard so?

The silence that followed was a pensive one. At last, Thor said, “I have trouble believing this to be the case.”

“If you’re right, I can understand why. But I’ve been working on this for months. I’m reasonably confident in my theory.” Her voice was gentle. “I’ll send you my work, just in case you can make something of it.”

“Thank you,” he said, tongue clumsy. It was unlikely. No matter how he wracked his mind, he knew few details of the Bifrost’s operation, and even less of Midgardian science, but he appreciated her efforts. “If you are amenable, I will see if SHIELD will permit me to visit you. I am owed some leave from duty.” Though as ever, Coulson had made it clear that he would prefer it if he did not venture too far. Thor tried to bear it with good grace, recalling the not-so-distant past in which they would have been correct to regard him as a threat.

“Amenable?” Jane asked. “Sure. We’ll put you up for a few days. I mean, if you stay with us, you might end up sleeping on the floor - I think I have an air mattress somewhere - “

He winced. He hadn’t intended to invite himself into Jane’s very home, just to see if he would be welcome in the same town. “I’ve slept on the ground before,” Thor said. “Your company is more important to me than a mattress. More important still is that I don’t trespass on your hospitality.”

“It’s not trespassing if I’ve asked you,” Jane said.

“If you’re sure, then.”

She was. Once again Thor found himself grateful for her kindness and generosity. Jane was truly a good person, as well as intelligent and beautiful. If he wished to court her, he realised, he should ask soon. This was not Asgard and he did not have centuries to spare ascertaining if they would make a good match. Mortal lives were short. If he ever wanted her to be a greater part of his, he had to act.

It was one sweet thing to think of, in the horror Jane had told him might be happening in his old home.

 

—

 

Clint got back from leave to find everyone else leaving. Nat and Phil were headed to England on something extra-classified.

“Fury said we could take you if we needed,” Nat had told him, “and we thought about it, but if we took you, then who’d deal with it if Stark made a robot that got out of control?”

“Fury,” Clint said. “He could shout it down.”

“As if Stark would ever make a robot that responded to people shouting at it.”

In the end he just wished her luck, since there wasn’t much else he could do in this case. Luck and good hunting. She definitely had the look in her eyes. Someone was going to get run to ground.

Thor, meanwhile, had managed to put in paperwork for leave and make travel plans to get to Puente Antiguo to see Foster. Not a match many people in SHIELD would have predicted, given that from what he realled of Foster, she didn’t have a lot of patience for people who couldn’t keep up with her, and Thor couldn’t name all the planets in the solar system.

“How are you getting there?” Clint couldn’t resist asking. Thor hated flying, and his driving skills…they were reserved for when every single other alternative driver was incapacitated.

“Flight, most of the way,” Thor said, with a look of utter distaste. “Then bus, and then Jane has offered to pick me up from the nearest town of note. I offered to walk, but she refused.”

Clint wished him luck, too, though Thor looked pretty grim for a man supposedly heading out to spend time with his girlfriend, or almost-girlfriend anyway. None of Clint’s business.

After a few months spent local, constantly working with a partner, it was strange to be working on his own again. Clint knew from experience that it would make a nice change at first, as he could work uninterrupted and not having to worry about someone else, and then it would get a bit lonely. He hoped that his friends wouldn’t be gone for that long.

First, though, there was the work. A few of Nat’s informants knew to contact him if they couldn’t reach her; he touched base with them, just in case, as well as checking with his own sources to see if anything weird was happening out there in the wide world. There were a few criminals getting a bit _too_ enterprising in their sale of souvenirs from Stark Expo, and even more aggressive in sourcing them; Clint started working on a way to shut them down and recover their stuff. They were working out of Fairfax, close enough to D.C. for SHIELD to find it concerning. It just took permission from Fury and he was out there on a good old solo mission.

Before he shut down the resalers, he had to check on their customers, and so he needed a good surveillance post. The process of finding one and setting it up was familiar. Comforting, even, in a way, because it meant things hadn’t gone to shit yet. There was a pattern to missions like this. After more than fifteen years of this sort of work, he knew it well. And when he got into the groove like this, it was hard to even think of retiring to be with his family.

Of course, when things went to shit, and they would inevitably go to shit sooner or later, that was when he’d wish he was back home.

Business for these guys was not exactly booming, but when you could make a few grand on a single metal shard, it didn’t really need to. Clint spent two reasonably pleasant stakeout days kicking back, keeping track of their internet listings, and running ID on anyone who walked through the doors. Nat called from somewhere in England to say that she and Phil were heading to somewhere in Norway for a bit. Clint used the spare time to brainstorm names for the new Barton he and Laura were happily expecting.

It was too good to last. On the third day, Fury called. “How close are you to getting this shut down?” he asked, no prelude, not even a ‘Hello, Barton.’

“A day or two, ideally, to see if I’ve missed anything,” Clint said. “They’re just aggressive, not smart. The cops could probably handle the actual arrests, if there’s SHIELD on site to take over afterwards.”

“Wrap it up,” Fury ordered. “I need you at the New Mexico facility as fast as you can get there.”

“New Mexico?” Clint said, bolting upright in his seat. “What’s the problem?”

“Stark,” Fury said. “He’s making an unscheduled trip to experiment on the hammer.”

A trip that would put him in proximity of both Thor and Foster. At the same time, even. Potential outcomes ranged from Stark and Foster collaborating on wormhole tech to Stark getting his nose broken, immediately preceding a Thor-Iron Man throwdown (and knowing Thor, it could be either an angry fight or a friendly fight). “I’ll get right to it,” Clint said.

“Keep in mind I want both a consultant and an alien when you’re done,” Fury replied, and hung up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for your patience!


	11. A Hammer

Thor decided he liked the bus better than the plane, but not by much. Why _did_ humans insist on cramming themselves into such cramped vessels? Especially when they had horses, which were just as excellent on Midgard as they were on Asgard. They might be slower, but that was not always a bad thing. They also allowed one to enjoy the open air.

Barton had once shown him a picture of a creature called a ‘camel,’ once, when the topic of riding had come up. Apparently in some parts of Earth humans rode those instead of horses. It looked like quite a different experience, and Thor wished to try it one day.

In the meantime, he was looking forward to arriving at Puente Antiguo and actually _walking_ somewhere. All this travel left him with far too much time to think, with not even a horse for company.

Out there, his surviving family and his old friends could be in danger and he could do nothing to help them. He could not even be certain if they were in danger. After months of working in a place where his brother’s skills were of more use than his own, he knew Loki could handle more than Thor might once have thought - and their mother, of course, was as valiant as she was clever - but that didn’t mean he didn’t wish to help.

He tried to focus on the desert outside. There was nothing he could do, at present and maybe not ever, and he had to make his peace with that.

The town he eventually arrived in was much like the other little towns he’d passsed through over the past few months, one street of shops supporting a small patchwork of houses. Asgard did not have such towns, only city and farmland. Thor wondered how it would be to live in such a small place. You would know everyone, after a time, and they would all know you. He could understand the appeal.

Jane called to say that she was running late, which left Thor to wait. He purchased a drink from the town’s little shop - one of the ones that fizzed, in a flavour that was supposed to be orange - and entertained himself walking around town. He found a little memorial to the residents of the town who had fought and died in previous Midgardian wars, and another more generic one for those who had died in road accidents nearby, he passed a little building calling itself the ‘town centre,’ and ultimately found a slightly older lady out walking her dog.

They did not have dogs on Asgard, but Thor had encountered many in his months in New York. They were friendly creatures, on the most part, and he appreciated their protectiveness of their human companions, and the enthusiasm with which they chased the plastic discs known as frisbees. He’d barely noticed such things on previous visits to Midgard. This one was large, and Thor approached so as not to alarm either the dog nor its companion. Fortunately, the dog decided he was no threat, a fact that put the human at ease, and so Thor managed to strike up a conversation.

“You’ve come a long way for just a few days,” the lady in question (Ruth, Thor had learned) said, when Thor had explained the duration, destination, and purpose of his journey.

“Indeed,” Thor replied, “But Jane is worth it.”

Ruth patted his arm. “It’d be nice if my daughter could find a man like you,” she said.

Her words made Thor profoundly uncomfortable. Kind as this lady was, she knew nothing of Thor’s still recent past. Warmonger, invader, the next thing to a patricide, rejected by Mjolnir. There was a great deal of blood on his hands. “I hope your daughter can find better,” he said.

Then he changed the subject. He would much rather learn of Ruth’s life in this small town, assisting in the purchase and maintenance of machinery for local businesses. By the time Ruth had to depart, Jane had still not arrived, though she promised she’d be less than half an hour. Thor returned to the little market and purchased water for himself, and a few more things for Jane when she arrived. He started to wonder if he would have been better walking to Puente Antiguo anyway, but too late now.

So he sat at the bus stop and read. Darcy had provided him with digital copies of several books, months ago, before Jane had scolded her for piracy. (A term that had broader application on Earth than on Asgard, to Thor’s disappointment.) Their tastes did not overlap much, but he had enjoyed several of the romances and he was currently working his way through the tale of the Lord of the Rings.

It still wasn’t his favourite pastime - for fiction, he preferred theatre, and since Natasha had shown him some videos of ballet, he had been saving money to see a live performance - but Earth fiction was no longer a mystery to him, and books did have the advantage of being more portable than an entire stage and cast.

At last, just as the sun was going down and the Fellowship was venturing into the Mines of Moria, Jane arrived, but not in her van. “I am so sorry,” she said. “The van broke down while I was on my way out of town. I had to borrow Darcy’s car.”

“It’s all right,” Thor said. “I can entertain myself.”

“Then you’re the first person I’ve met who doesn’t mind waiting at bus stops,” Jane said. “Come on, let’s get you back to my place. We’ve got to pick up something for dinner on the way, though, if we can.”

Thor produced his little bag of shopping. It was nothing impressive - frozen fare, and a few sweets he knew Jane liked - but Jane beamed at him. “You’re a lifesaver,” she said.

“I didn’t think any of us would have the energy to cook,” he said. “And you’ve told me before of the difficulty of buying food in Puente Antiguo after six.” Thor had heard of standard office hours, and rarely spoke to anyone who kept them.

“A lifesaver,” Jane repeated, and hustled him into yet another tiny metal vehicle. At least this one had other attractions.

 

—

 

The next day, for lack of anything better to do, Thor went to work with Jane.

“You’re supposed to be on _leave_ ,” Darcy said, when they stopped by Jane’s workshop first. (Jane still had no love for SHIELD and tried to work separately from them whenever possible. Visits to their facility were only done as necessary.) “That means you don’t go to work at all.”

“I’ve never taken leave before,” Thor said. “You have to expect it will take me some time to get it right.” He liked Darcy, but he did not wish to discuss Asgard and its possible troubles with her. Not at the moment.

Besides, it was hard to object to spending more time with Jane, and he could literally ease some of her burdens by carrying the machinery she needed moved in order to clean and calibrate it. Humble work, dull, but necessary. There were times such things could be soothing, much like the repetitive practice needed to excel as a warrior. Before he’d been exiled, he’d never washed his own clothing, bedding, or dishes save on extended hunting expeditions - he could find a certain pride in it, when done right, almost as he could find pride on a training field.

He wished he could tell his fashion-conscious brother how he now knew how to care for Loki’s favourite clothing far better than _he_ did, and watch the look on his face.

“That’s about it,” Jane announced at last. “Time to go to SHIELD. Thor, really, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” Thor repeated.

He could admit to himself that he wanted to see Mjolnir again, and that thought too burdened him as he and Jane drove to the SHIELD facility he’d broken into months ago. He may not be worthy to hold her, but she had been his companion in many a fight. It saddened him to think she would be lost and abandoned here. With luck, a worthy warrior of Midgard might pick her up for an equally worthy cause, but he doubted it. Such artefacts were not meant for humans. Even as he had been, the hammer’s power was tremendous and handling it was a challenge. As he was now, even if he could so much as pick it up, attempting to use Mjolnir might kill him.

As they drove, Jane asked, “Are you all right?”

“Just thinking,” Thor said. “These last few months seem to have been very long.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Jane said. “I had enough trouble just moving across the country to go to college. I missed my family all the time, it was awful. I even missed my sister, and we spent most of our time fighting.”

“It was the same with me and my own brother. But no matter how we fought, he still came along on most every adventure my friends and I had.” He hadn’t spoken of his family to anyone all these months, not even Jane. “Working with SHIELD has shown me that there are times I doubt we paid him his proper due, yet he was there all the same.”

“Your younger brother?”

“Yes,” Thor said. “How did you know?”

“It’s just a younger sibling thing, I think,” Jane said. “My sister’s older than me, and I spent a lot of my time trying to tag along with her, when we were kids. You should hear Darcy talk about her little brothers. It’s pretty normal, I think.”

Thor thought about it, and then said, “No, I think this might have been worse. He saved our lives on several occasions, and on those occasions we did not give him the gratitude he ought to have received.” Sometimes they had even mocked Loki. He’d said many things over the years that now struck him as cruel.

And he would never get to apologise. He’d thought it before, but here it was again. There was a lump in his throat.

Jane glanced at him, then took a hand off the wheel to rest it briefly on his arm. “Maybe he’ll visit you, and you can tell him then.”

“Maybe,” Thor said, though he held out little hope. Even so, Loki was not one for doing as he had been told. It was possible. There  _was_ hope.

They didn’t speak again until they arrived, and once he was there, Thor found himself delaying on seeing Mjolnir. He busied himself helping Jane instead. There was cleaning to be done. Maintenance. Proofreading. Attempting to decipher Jane’s figures, trying to work out if the Bifrost was truly broken. Anything but seeing Mjolnir and fighting the temptation to try and pick her up again.

The second day of his leave, he spent reading and practicing his driving (“Never again,” Darcy said, when they were done, “my insurance can’t handle that madness”) before cooking dinner for Jane, Erik, and Darcy, one of the few Midgardian recipes he had mastered. Tuna casserole was not fine cuisine, but it tasted good enough, and was both nourishing and inexpensive. When he proposed that he cook again the next night, seeing as he was not working, they agreed.

It was on the fourth day that Jane returned to the SHIELD facility, and again Thor went with her. This time, he told himself. This time he would look.

When they arrived, there was rather more activity at the base than usual. He looked at Jane questioningly, but she only shrugged at him as they entered. “I’ve never seen that many cars here before either,” she said.

“As far as I know, Agent Coulson’s still away,” Thor said. “Though I doubt he, or anyone else, would tell me if there was anything of import planned here, except to keep me from this place.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Jane said.

With that acknowledged, Thor steeled himself and sought out Mjolnir.

It was at the centre of the facility, as if the entire place was a shrine. Maybe it was. A tribute to things humanity didn’t understand and which came from beyond their world. His people had been worshipped as gods here. He remembered his last visit, still a boy, but thinking himself a man, and showing off for the little people so impressed by Mjolnir’s power.

The real wonder may have been that Mjolnir had _ever_ come to his hand, Thor thought, grim. All that power and what did he use it for? His own ego. He certainly hadn’t seen that the mortals may well have been more fearful than truly admiring.

He rounded the last corner, and there she was. Mjolnir, just as he’d left her. As he’d been forced to leave her. Still in the rock, like the story of King Arthur that Barton had related to him once. Now that he saw her, he wondered just what he thought he was doing. Mjolnir was no longer his. He had no claim on it. This was nostalgia and self-indulgence.

He turned away -

\- and nearly collided with a shorter man, walking briskly towards the hammer. “Watch it, buddy,” the man said. “I’m working here.”

 

—

 

The thing was, Coulson had never explicitly said Tony couldn’t come back to look at the hammer. Tony kept thinking about it in his spare time. What on earth - or off earth - sort of metal was it even made of? It defied all his analysis. That, and how come he couldn’t budge it?

He had a few new ideas, too, but he needed to test them, and this time he needed to bring more specialised equipment. Well, he had a few days he could spare, and better to ask forgiveness than permission. SHIELD wasn’t going to kill him for this. When he told Pepper what he planned, she raised her eyebrows at him. “Just be careful,” she said.

“When have I not been careful?” he demanded. “I mean, in the past few years. Before that doesn’t count.”

“I can think of a few times, Mr I Am Iron Man,” she replied. “Just try to only annoy the one government agency, and if you can be back before the thing on Friday, that’d be great. I need some arm candy.”

“I do like being arm candy,” Tony mused. “You’ve got a deal.”

So the next morning he packed up all his stuff and made the same trip out to New Mexico as he had before. And not telling SHIELD again either, though he had no doubt they’d find out soon enough anyway.

The place hadn’t changed since he’d been there last. Country towns. That was why Tony avoided them. How boring would it be? The facility with the hammer was still squat and dull, and incredibly out of place. The fences looked a bit sturdier, and there were a few more cameras visible. Nothing too dramatic. Well, nothing any more dramatic than taking over a small country town to investigate aliens already was.

Tony didn’t bother with subterfuge. He just walked up to the front door and flashed his credentials. The young agent at the front let him in without any fuss, which just went to show what confidence could do. That said, he knew perfectly well that it’d only be a few minutes before someone important found out that he was here.

If he remembered correctly, the hammer was in the exact middle of the facility, or close enough to make no difference. Some burly blond guy (in flannels, oddly, not the standard SHIELD suit, but he guessed they couldn’t _all_ be welded into their businesswear like Agent Coulson) was standing in the way, and Tony brushed past him. First things first, baselines. He had to make sure the hammer really hadn’t changed since the last time he poked at it.

Sure enough, there wasn’t even a scratch on it. Whatever metal this was, it was sturdy. “Not a flake of rust,” Tony said aloud. And it _had_ been exposed to moisture. “Are they oiling it?” He examined where rock and hammer met, and where it would be all but impossible to treat the metal, but again, no trace of rust. “That is some good weatherproofing.”

Behind him, the guy he’d walked past said, “What are you doing?”

“Today? Trying to see what’s going on where the hammer and the rock meet. They don’t _look_ fused. More like the hammer’s just resting there. Weird thing though, if the hammer’s so heavy we can’t move it, given the angle the hammer’s resting at, you’d expect the rock to be showing some stress.”

That was going to be the more productive angle for the day, he decided. Tony started unpacking his gear.

Blond SHIELD goon said, “You are Anthony Stark, yes?”

“ _Tony_ Stark,” Tony said automatically. Then, “Okay, that’s new. Never had anyone ask before. Unless it’s ‘oh my god, is that really Tony Stark?!’ Interrobang and all. I take it you don’t watch the news much. Or read the papers. Or go online.”

“I do all those things,” Goon said.

Tony glanced back at him and didn’t believe it. Him and his Point Break hair looked like they’d be more at home on a beach, with a surfboard, than in the library. “Then you clearly don’t look in the right places,” he said, and turned his attention back to the hammer. “The point is, I couldn’t lift that thing even when I chained it to my suit and blasted my repulsors full throttle. I don’t know if you know how much horsepower that is, but trust me, it’s a lot. If it’s really got that much mass, it shouldn’t be resting there. It should have snapped that bit of rock right there” - he pointed - “and gone crashing to the ground.”

“And?”

“ _And_ , if that hasn’t happened, then maybe the hammer’s not actually that heavy. If it’s not that heavy, there must be some other reason nobody can pick it up. A security system or something.”

Behind him, someone came up to Point Break and said, “Mr Smith? Mr Smith, a call for you.”

“Seriously?” Tony called back. “You’re an Agent Smith? Did they find you a Mr Anderson?”

Point Break just looked confused, and said, “No, and I do not know what that means. Forgive me. It was nice to meet you, Tony Stark, but I must go.”

Tony waved him off. SHIELD’s hiring practices were none of his business. What was more worrying was that they had people who hadn’t seen _The Matrix_. Next thing he knew, he’d find out they didn’t know who the Men In Black were. If they were employing people based on shoulder breadth - like a blacksmith, seriously -

\- Smith. Like a man with a hammer.

Tony whipped around. He could still see Point Break’s Point Break hair, long and blond. Just like the hair sample SHIELD had given him to analyse a few months ago, the one that belonged to someone who had spent quite a bit of time off Earth.

He’d found SHIELD’s astronaut. “Goddamn it,” Tony said, and hurried to catch up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and your comments/kudos/bookmarks!


	12. Bargain

This was not a sure thing. Really, he was mostly going on the fact that this guy was blond and clueless. And _Smith_. That sounded like an agent’s sense of humour, if Smith really was from outer space. Alien himself? He didn’t _look_ like an alien. It was the Swayze hair. It was hard to imagine aliens as having Swayze hair, even after finding proof of extraterrestrial civilisations via conditioner.

Tony hurried along behind the agents. It wasn’t like him to trail after anyone, but this was an exception, for the sake of his curiosity.

Unfortunately, he came across a closed door. Thwarted again. Temporarily. Tony decided he’d wait. Again, because of his curiosity.

It wasn’t so long a wait as he’d anticipated. Tony had barely had time to start fiddling with the scanner he hadn’t bothered putting down when the door opened and Point Break walked right back out, a frown on his face. The frown only got deeper when he saw Tony. “Stark,” he said, a slight question to the word. “Did you follow me?”

“Yep,” Tony said. “It occurred to me that you might know a thing or two about that hammer back there. I mean, I know SHIELD found someone from outer space a few months ago. That’s you, right?”

Point Break cracked a smile. Good start. “Indeed,” he said. “Though few here have been so blunt about it as you.”

Well, while bluntness was working for him, he might as well go all in. “You an alien? Or just a repatriate?” This could be against so much space etiquette. While Tony’s respect for Earth etiquette was low, there was still an art to getting away with faux pas. He could get his block knocked off for this. Always better to know which set of manners you were flouting, first.

“Immigrant,” Point Break said. No offence taken, thank goodness. Then again, who knew how many times SHIELD had asked him that sort of thing? “More truthfully, an exile. I am as human as you are, though I was not born on Earth.”

If Tony knew more about alien societies that would be fascinating. As it was, it was just interesting. “So,” he said, focusing on his real concern. “ _Do_ you know about that hammer?”

Nope. No luck. Smile to frown. “The call I just received asked me to stay away from you, Tony Stark,” he said. “Security issues, they said.”

“What security issues?” Tony asked. “I work for SHIELD, sometimes, and you work for SHIELD. No problem at all.”

“I cannot speak for them. I was not given reasons. Just a request.” He sighed, and said, “Forgive me. I did not even introduce myself. I am Thor Smith.”

There was the tiniest hesitation between the first name and surname. Tony would bet it was not the name Thor had been given when he was born. Not the surname, anyway, because he wasn’t sure how many people these days named their kids _Thor_. Last he checked this wasn’t Norway. Unless SHIELD had named him for the hammer. Tony was shocked enough at discovering Agent Agent had a sense of humour, so there was really no telling. “Good to meet you, Mr Smith,” Tony said. “You’re very dull. What’s life without a little telling the powers that be where to stick it?”

That only made Point Break frown harder, and after a little confusion over what ‘stick it’ meant, Thor said, “I’ve done that before. It did not turn out very well for anyone involved. Forgive me, Stark. I am sure I would enjoy answering your questions to the best of my ability, limited though that might be.”

And, with a regretful nod, he walked off.

Less than productive. Tony headed back towards the hammer, mulling things over further. SHIELD didn’t trust him entirely (or their undocumented immigrant worker, tsk tsk - or wait, had they actually _got_ him the documents? That couldn’t be totally above board), no real surprising news there, they were spies, they didn’t trust anyone. But what Thor himself had said wasn’t a no. It was an ‘if only.’

Tony didn’t like his chances of lying to Thor about this one. No no, suddenly SHIELD reversed their position and said they were fine with you talking to me! Seemed unlikely. But perhaps a bit of persuasion wouldn’t go amiss.

Now, how on earth did you bribe extraterrestrial immigrants? If etiquette was a thorny thicket, the politics of bribery was worse. Stark Industries had done enough shady business with enough shady regimes over the years for Tony to know. He kept the thought tucked away as he went back to trying to weigh the hammer.

He had a reasonably useful day of collecting data, but he finished up unsatisfied. As he left, though, passing by a collection of machinery SHIELD hadn’t let him touch, he saw something interesting - or rather, someone. A couple of interest. Thor with the astrophysicist, Foster, who Coulson hadn’t let him talk to earlier in the year. It looked like she and Thor might be a little more than friendly, and it also looked like she was trying to explain her work to him.

So Thor was allowed to speak to scientists, just not Tony. More to the point, Point Break could _help_ the scientists, even if he still looked like a meathead. Even if he only had a rudimentary understanding of whatever alien tech got him here, and whatever was going on with the hammer, he could potentially cut down on months of reinventing the alien wheel.

And once he’d reinvented the alien wheel, there would be more interesting things beyond that. New applications. New technologies. The things he could _do_ \- the arc reactor was only the start (and he had to get back to Pepper about switching the new building over to arc reactor tech, too, now that he thought of it).

He didn’t have to leave Puente Antiguo right away. Time to meet up with potential colleagues _after_ work hours, Tony thought.

 

—

 

Jane had as little idea of why SHIELD would not wanthim to associate with Stark as Thor himself did. “I’m a scientist, not a spy,” she said. “Maybe it makes sense to them.”

“Perhaps,” Thor said, but it left him with questions. It didn’t make sense to him either. He knew SHIELD did not fully trust him; he had not expected Barton to call with such a request. SHIELD let him talk to Jane, and she was brilliant enough; why should Stark be any different? Very confusing. The best he could come up with was the nature of Stark’s expertise made for a more undesirable association.

They saw Stark briefly in passing as they departed for the evening. Thor had but two more days of leave before he was due back in New York. Time was short. Tonight, he had arranged to purchase a meal for Jane, just the two of them. No Darcy, no Erik. When he had proposed the idea, Jane had smiled at him and gone a little pink in the cheeks before accepting.

A good sign.

The restaurant they were going to was nothing special. It was in the next town - Jane would have to drive them - but it was a little nicer than the diner in Puente Antiguo, and somewhere she did not go every week. According to the internet, the fare was simple but pleasantly cooked, and the price was within Thor’s means.

Jane declared that they should not talk about work for a few hours, and they had just ordered their meals over a pleasant discussion of their mutual experiences of London when, rather abruptly, a third figure slid into the booth next to Thor and said, “But have either of you tried the nightclubs?”

“Stark?” Thor asked. The man wore a suit, now, and dark glasses, but the voice and stature were the same. As was the way he moved, which was quite unique. No doubt due to his Iron Man suit, Thor thought. Stark was recognisably a fighter, though not one trained like any he knew. “What are you doing here?”

“And can’t you tell this is a private dinner?” Jane asked waspishly.

Thor smiled; Stark was wealthy and famous in this world, and Jane did not hesitate to stand up for herself in spite of that. It was a strength he’d never had to appreciate before he came to Midgard.

“Sorry, sorry,” Stark said. “I just wanted to chat without the spies breathing down our necks. I can make it up to you next time you’re in New York, I know a few good steakhouses, and we’re not under surveillance. Assuming we’re ever not under surveillance.”

“That seems unlikely,” Jane replied.

“Yeah,” Stark said. “I’ll think of something.” He turned to Thor then. “I couldn’t help but notice that you said you’d be happy to answer my questions about that hammer of yours.”

“It’s not mine,” Thor said. “But yes, in principle. I see no reason not to.” The precise process of Mjolnir’s forging was a mystery, even to him. If Stark was anywhere near as clever as Jane, he could learn a lot even so - but he doubted Stark could learn enough to threaten Asgard within the remainder of their mortal lifespans.

“Great!” Stark said, and without further prompting signalled one of the waitstaff, ordering a drink. “So, can we start with the basics? What’s it made of?”

An idea lit up. “I would ask for something in return, first,” he said, looking across the table at Jane. Annoyed as she was that their meal had been interrupted, he could see she understood Stark’s eagerness to know more. “Jane has a theory about the device that brought me here. I find it hard to believe. Not because of her science, but because of what it would mean.”

Jane reached across the table to take his hand and squeeze it. Stark, again, seemed to understand, and said to her, “You up for a little peer review?”

“SHIELD haven’t been letting me confer widely,” Jane said, in her professional voice. “If you don’t mind me asking, Mr Stark, what do you know about my field?”

“Not a whole lot, yet,” Stark said. “I did read most of what you’ve published.” From there he launched into a discussion of something Jane had written that Thor did not understand, but which clearly caught Jane’s interest. “I’m not an expert,” Stark concluded, “but I can catch up, and I’ve got an engineering perspective to add.”

Jane turned to Thor and said, “He’ll be able to help.”

“Excellent,” Thor said, though it did not feel excellent.

“Don’t send me anything,” Stark said to Jane. “I’ll hack into your computers and take it. That should keep SHIELD off your back. They know I break into their systems already.”

She looked at him strangely. “Never thought I’d thank someone for hacking into my computer, but yes, thank you, Mr Stark.”

“Tony,” Stark said. “I’ll hold you to that deal, Point Break. Second opinion on Dr Foster’s calculations for answers about that hammer, the best you can give me.”

“Agreed,” Thor said.

“Then I’ll leave you two to your date,” Stark said. He downed his drink with impressive speed, raised his eyebrows in a manner Thor had learned was supposed to be suggestive, and departed.

“So much for a conversation not about work,” Jane said.

“I hope I have not offended you,” Thor said. “Truly, I do not doubt your skills, nor do I mean to call them into question.”

Jane squeezed his hand again. She hadn’t moved it. “That’s fine,” she said. “Academics have a whole system of checking each other’s work. I haven’t been able to get someone else to review my work properly since SHIELD took over my lab. Having anyone else check it is good for me, even if I wouldn’t have expected Tony Stark to be the reviewer.”

Their food arrived. It was as the internet had promised - good, but not exceptional. At last, Thor said, “I didn’t understand why he kept calling me Point Break. Is that another reference?”

“I don’t get it either,” Jane said. “I think it’s a movie. Maybe we should rent it.”

“Just the two of us?” Thor asked.

“Sounds good to me,” Jane said.

He had to admit, in the end, that he didn’t understand the movie either, though the sport of surfing looked enjoyable. The company, on the other hand, was excellent.

 

—

 

“I’ve decided,” Natasha announced. “I hate the cold. Next mission, I want it to be in Ibiza. Somewhere in the Mediterranean.” She hadn’t really decided just then. She had a lot of bad memories of being cold. It didn’t sound as whiny, though, which was a plus. She huddled into her coat and pulled her scarf up over her nose. There was way too much ice around here, and it was only looking to get worse.

Coulson said, “I’ll take it under advisement. We may have to consult with the opposition.”

Coulson didn’t have the decency to shiver, of course. Or, looked at another way, he didn’t have the luxury of allowing himself to react to the cold. Natasha could say what she liked; if she had to, she could pass it off as a lie. Coulson had built his professional persona around being unflappable. Like a postman. Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night was permitted to cause the tiniest crack in Coulson’s demeanour. And if Natasha told herself it was his burden, she wasn’t going to get half as annoyed at the fact he looked perfectly fine in his heavy coat, while she thought she might be getting frostbite.

So far they’d managed to determine that their friends of neo-Hydra were chasing down every report of every weather balloon ever to go down over the ocean. It had taken them a few days sounding out various recovery teams to discover that. This incarnation of Hydra was nowhere near as competent and dangerous as the first. Honestly, Natasha was feeling wasted. If it wasn’t for how seriously Fury took any threat of Hydra, this would be below her pay grade.

“What do you think this one is?” Natasha asked. “Weather balloon again? Fishing wreckage? Oddly shaped mass of litter?”

“Fishing wreckage,” Coulson said, after a short pause to consider. “They can’t all be weather balloons.”

Either way it was a long, cold trip along bleak, frozen coastline. Natasha would settle for their next mission being in a city, too. She was not made for the country life. If Clint were here he would be laughing at her.

Natasha drove them to the place where they were meeting their guide. It was a stretch of stony coast the same as a lot of others she’d seen over the past week. A fisherman waited for them, also wrapped up warmly. “You wanting to sail out?” he asked.

“Yes,” Coulson said. “Payment, as agreed.”

The man pocketed the cash Coulson handed over. Natasha kept a close eye to make sure he wasn’t about to bring out any weapons. You never knew. It could be a trap. She almost hoped it was, because that at least wouldn’t be boring. But no, the fisherman simply led them to another boat and steered them to a smaller cove. “I’ve lived here thirty years and in all that time only local people come here,” he told them as they sailed. “It’s some rusty metal. That’s all.”

“Humour us,” Natasha said.

“It’s been there for years too,” the man continued. “It was under some rocks, but a few years back we had a bad storm out hereand half the cliff collapsed and turned it up. We keep saying that it needs to be hauled out, but the government won’t do it. Not worth the time or trouble. Someone’s going to get tetanus off it one day, probably a kid thinking it’s something to play with…”

After a while, Natasha just tuned him out (while Coulson listened) and tried to enjoy the coastline. It wasn’t her thing. Too grey. Too _cold_. She wished they could have driven all the way there, rather than having to take the boat trip. If their guide was right, there were routes by foot as well. They might have been preferable, if not quicker. The walking would have kept them warm.

At last, they pulled up on a pebbly beach no different to five other pebbly beaches they’d passed in the last few days. “Here it is,” their guide said.

“Thank you,” Coulson said.

They didn’t need to discuss it. Natasha took point. If there was anyone there, if this was an ambush, nobody would get past her to the civilian (and if the civilian was in on it, Coulson had her back).

What they’d come to see wasn’t all that big. A chunk of slowly rusting metal, recognisable only as wreckage, propped up against a cliff face. Their guide was right, it probably _would_ give some poor kid tetanus at some point, if anyone up here ever took off their gloves. She circled around it slowly, finding no evidence that anyone was currently waiting to shoot them down where they stood. That done, she beckoned Coulson over.

“What do you think?” she asked. Quietly, though their conversation would be drowned out by the waves. She knew how to fly planes, but Coulson knew more about the actual _planes_.

Coulson said, “I’m no expert. Maybe a wing. Something torn loose at impact. It’s in pretty good shape if it’s been out here for a few years.” He climbed up closer to get a better look.

Natasha followed him. “Did we make a formal bet on the weather balloon thing?” she asked, hoisting herself up on a rock and narrowly avoiding a sharper edge. “I might owe you some money.”

“No,” Coulson said. His voice sounded strange. “I think we can call that bet a wash. Nat, look at this.”

She did, though it was a scramble getting past him. But he was right, that much was clear. Painted on the wing, half obscured by rust, was the distinctive skull-and-serpent symbol of Hydra.


	13. On Ice

When Clint got to Puente Antiguo, neither Thor nor Stark had burned the place down, which he took as a positive sign.

Actually, when Clint got to Puente Antiguo, Stark had cleared out altogether. He’d got what he came for, Clint assumed - a chance to play with something shiny and mysterious. Still dangerous, though. Stark had built the first Iron Man suit out of junk metal, or so Phil said. Clint didn’t like thinking about the harm he could do with a full workshop and alien tech. Neither did Fury, apparently, to the point where Clint had to cross the country to monitor the situation.

At least the phone call had worked fine. Thor had agreed willingly enough not to strike up a friendship with Stark.

Clint looked around at the facility. It was looking a bit more permanent these days. Not quite so pre-fab. He recognised some of the agents, too, mostly the younger ones. Months-long reassignment to middle-of-nowhere New Mexico. Probably not the career move they’d dreamed of at the outset, but it couldn’t be helped.

At least he didn’t plan to be here long. Just long enough to make sure everything here was secure. No engineers punching holes in the universe just to see what happened, or if any aliens came out the other end. So brilliant, you could mistake it for stupidity. If that sort of thing was going to happen, SHIELD wanted to be in full control of the process. They’d rather get Foster to do it, was Clint’s bet.

He spotted Thor first, to his surprise, coming in to work with Foster on his arm. So that had worked out, then. Clint was happy for him. Wherever he’d come from, Thor didn’t say much about the people he’d left behind. Leaving them couldn’t have been easy. New friends in his life, ones outside SHIELD, had to be a good thing for him. Like Laura had been for Clint.

Thor spotted him too, and headed over, Foster in tow. “Barton!” the other man cried, clearly in a good mood. “An unexpected pleasure to see you here, my friend.”

“Just came to give you a lift back,” Clint said. And to check up on what Stark had been doing here.

“Thank you,” Thor said. “I’ve had my experience with buses. They are not pleasant.”

“You don’t think any transport other than walking is pleasant,” Clint pointed out, which got a smile from Foster. “Don’t let him drive you anywhere,” he said to her specifically.

“Too late,” Foster said. “He’s traumatised my assistant for life.”

There was one of those small pauses that Clint had come to recognise as Thor mastering a flash of temper. “You were the one who ran into me,” he said to Foster, after that pause and with every indication of good humour. “Twice.”

Foster blushed and laughed herself. Good save.

“So you two met Stark, I hear,” Clint said, changing the topic to work under the cover of casual conversation. “Did you get to see any of the Iron Man stuff?”

“Regrettably not,” said Thor. “He was far more interested in Mjolnir.”

Clint hadn’t even known Thor was wise to the nickname the techs had given the hammer - it fell to the earth with a guy named Thor, of course some mythology nerd on staff had found out, and of course they were calling it Mjolnir now. Then again, Thor had been here for almost a week. It’d be more surprising if he _hadn’t_ talked to someone and discovered that nickname. Thor would talk to anyone. “Not surprising, I guess,” Clint said. “You got everything ready for the trip back?”

“My effects are at Jane’s,” Thor said. “I can return and retrieve them, if I am trusted with driving.”

“Nah. We can afford to wait. The insurance, not so much.”

Thor barked a laugh, and again Foster joined in. A few months ago he wouldn’t have even known what insurance was, Clint knew.

“Anyway,” Clint continued, “You just do whatever it was you’re doing here. Science, I’m assuming, Dr Foster?”

“Science,” Foster agreed. If she was happy to laugh with Thor, the gaze she turned on him was more suspicious. Still hadn’t forgiven Phil stealing her work, Clint would bet. “I had better get to it. Nice to meet you, Agent Barton.”

Once she’d gone, Clint said, “Smart lady.”

“Indeed,” Thor said.

“Good catch.”

“Indeed.”

Clint slapped him on the back. “Then I don’t know what she’s doing with you,” he said. “I’ve got a few things to do here before we start heading back to New York. You going to be able to occupy yourself for the rest of the day?”

“Of course. There are a few agents who have sought me out expressing their desire for a rematch.” Thor grinned. “I am happy to oblige, naturally. And if Jane requires my assistance moving any of her machinery, I am happy to oblige her as well.”

Yeah, Clint would just bet he was. On both accounts. “We’ll get your stuff around four. We’re driving to the airport and taking a flight back to New York.”

That visibly dampened Thor’s mood somewhat. The man did hate flying. But he just said, “I will be ready.”

Once he’d gone, Clint headed off to review the footage of Thor’s run-in with Stark. It hadn’t been that long, as far as he could tell. Just a few words exchanged over the hammer. Clint watched, eyebrows raised, as screen-Stark realised something and went haring after Thor (who’d gone to answer Clint’s call). A bit of lip-reading of their second chat outside the office, and Clint resolved to have a word with Thor about how clearance levels didn’t go away if the other party was correct in their suspicions.

At least Thor had listened. That was something. If anything, Clint was surprised that _Stark_ had listened.

But no, Stark had left with only a little bit of sulking. He’d barely protested at all. That wasn’t just surprising, that was outright shocking. The footage they had of him driving away showed him heading back to the motel, apparently compliant.

Clint did not totally trust it, but there his material ran out. They’d have to be on watch for Stark in future, when they were all in NewYork. Stark did not give up so easily. That much, Clint knew.

 

—

 

Natasha had never seen Coulson like this. He was practically in a frenzy, neo-Hydra all but forgotten. “This could be the _Valkyrie_ itself,” he said. “The first sign anyone’s found of it in all these years. We don’t know of any other Hydra activity in the region, ever.”

“Great. The _Valkyrie_.” It meant just about nothing to Natasha, just a faint pinging in the back of her mind.

“The ship Captain America brought down,” Coulson said, and _ah_ , that explained that. She hadn’t recalled the ship’s name. No wonder Coulson was so flustered. She was going to be hearing about Captain America non-stop for several days now.

Nor, as he ventured the possibility that they might be able to recover the body or effects of Captain Rogers, could Natasha get excited. Dead heroes - it wasn’t her sort of thing. Dead was dead, and Natasha didn’t believe in heroes. Not like Coulson did. It was sweet, but it was impossible too.

Coulson got on the phone to Fury and arranged for experts in air crashes, ocean currents, and underwater retrieval in freezing conditions, while Natasha tried to keep her mind on the job. They were here because of this Tesseract thing and idiots pretending to be a Nazi offshoot long dead. Historical value had to wait.

She’d tracked down reservations at the local motel and was going through them. There were a few bookings from people out of town. It was a matter of running them down, now. They couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Tesseract. Top priority.

At the end of a busy afternoon, they debriefed.

“We should detain them,” Natasha said. “We’ve got cause, and we shouldn’t let them any closer to their goal.”

“I agree. Can you arrange for a helicopter?”

“Already done. Weather permitting. Agents will pick them up in two days.” And then they’d get grilled to within an inch of their lives.

Coulson nodded. “I’ve got the expert reports with a few likely sites to investigate. Two of them aren’t far. They’ll be investigated first.”

It was all she could do not to sigh. More sailing around looking for wrecks. If she’d wanted to do that for a living, she’d have got out of this game a long time ago and taken up maritime archaeology. It wasn’t hard to see how eager he was to go (surprisingly enough), and so they bundled up with the inrush of workers to go check out the site.

When they got there, it was a sheet of ice. Big surprise there. There were a few machines already out there, and people prodding at the ice.

“We’re still looking,” the foreman reported to Coulson and Natasha. “We’ve only been here a few days. All we’ve got so far is rust in the ice, but that’s a promising sign.”

Coulson requested and got better explanations of the testing and recovery work while Natasha scrutinised the workers. Their background checks had all come up clean, so far, but so would Natasha’s own. It didn’t mean that much. SHIELD was still running their own, better, checks. In the meantime Natasha was on guard.

They were just about to leave for the evening when a tech hurried in. “Sir. You’ll want to see this.”

The way it was said halted Natasha in her tracks, and Coulson after her. Aware that all eyes in the room were on her, the tech continued, rather nervously, “We’ve found a wreck. Doesn’t look like a weather balloon. It’s a big one.”

“Take us there,” Coulson said.

“There’s not much to see,” the tech said. “It’s still under the ice.”

Coulson looked at Natasha.

“You stay here,” Natasha said. It was obvious where Coulson’s interest was. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

Coulson nodded. Natasha could read his gratitude in the gesture. All things Captain America were important to Coulson. It was strange not to doubt his loyalty despite knowing this; the worst Coulson would do was redefine the agency’s interests to be compatible with his desire to pursue this particular personal agenda, and even then she could rely on him not to overstep a serious line. Trust. What a strange thing.

They still had work to do, though. At least Natasha could do hers from town, rather than out here on an ice sheet. Much more palatable.

 

—

 

Thor had not realised SHIELD’s mistrust of him ran that deeply.

It was one thing not to be included in matters of grave import. That was as it should be. Higher levels of trust required greater proof of commitment. He could even understand SHIELD’s request that he stay close to their bases of operation. It was another matter entirely to send an agent like Barton after him on the mere suspicion that Thor might have associated with someone SHIELD did not want him to associate with. That chafed more deeply. The mere exchange of a few words, and they sent Barton.

He did not hold it against Barton, he thought, as the other man passed him a magazine and a small packet of hard candy to help forestall the unpleasant popping in his ears from the changes in air pressure. Barton’s profession and his professional caution belied a generous spirit. Thor had met warriors such as he before, devoted to their cause rather than to violence for its own sake. If Barton struck him down, it would be because he considered it his duty. It was SHIELD itself Thor was feeling less kindly towards.

“The agency picked up the tab for changing your flights,” Barton said. Aside from the reprimand regarding confirming his place of origin to Stark, they had not spoken of their work.

“That is most kind of them,” Thor said.

“We do have some sense of fair play.”

Loki would be surprised if he could see Thor now. Or hear him. _You’ve never been able to lie well enough to fool a baby, Thor_ , Loki had told him. More than once. Learn from liars, and sooner or later…

For the first time, Thor had cause to regret some of the things he’d learned on Earth.

So he changed the topic. Sporting events on Earth were a pale imitation of true battle, for the most part, but Barton followed certain teams avidly, so Thor inquired as to how they had fared in their games. Poorly, on the whole, and the question provoked a tirade that showed less true anger than passion. The recitation of the failings of both his team and the umpires lasted them until the plane was actually departing.

When they returned to New York in the early hours of the morning, Thor texted Jane to let her know he had arrived safely and well, as she had requested of him (even knowing that such a message would arrive at an inopportune time for her). He already missed her. Then, as he had learned to enjoy doing, he took a walk through the city.

Right now he missed his parents, too. His mother might hate him now, but he would have so liked her insight. He had not valued that as he might have, before. What would she be able to divine of Asgard’s problems from this vantage point? Was he even doing the right thing, concerning himself with the affairs of his former home? He still had few connections outside SHIELD on Midgard, and he was not blind to how his deal with Stark was against their wishes.

Not long before the sun rose, Thor found himself looking up at Stark Tower. Half-finished, the lower levels gleamed like the other glass towers of the city, while the upper levels were still clad in scaffolding. It would be magnificent when it was completed, no doubt.

He simply could not imagine loving towers like these as he loved the gold of Asgard.

Where SHIELD had been generous, where Barton and Agent Romanov had been good friends, and he would never regret meeting and coming to know Jane, Asgard was still his home. He could not easily forget his mother, his brother, and his oldest friends. He had to _know_. Whatever SHIELD wished of him, this he had to know.

And then - and then, he was not sure.

Thor turned his feet towards the building he had called home for the past months. It might be time to look for a dwelling of his own. SHIELD would no doubt ask that he stayed close, but there were many places in this city that were close. At the very least, Jane might visit him more freely in an apartment that he paid for. It was a happy thought to close the day on.

After a brief nap (the only kind of sleep he had any time for this day, thanks to his walk earlier) he took up the routine he had become accustomed to, arriving in SHIELD’s office early after a brisk workout. The men and women he worked with greeted him with smiles. He had got to know several of them quite well, and everyone in this office at least in passing. He trained with several, too, though none could equal Natasha Romanov in sparring (she was still away on a mission, to Thor’s disappointment), and very few Clint Barton. The work on his desk was also very much to his liking - a routine protection detail for a scientist conferencing in Aspen, no matter that the brief said there would be no time for fun and the prices in the town would make his nose bleed - and a request to assist with the training of some junior agents. Thor grinned as he read that the young men in question were getting a bit cocky. Thor knew cocky.

Whatever else he decided to do when he learned what was happening in Asgard, he was certain that he could not simply sit by and allow his exile to pass. He had been given a chance as much as he had been given a sentence. It was up to him to make something of it.

 

—

 

The workers wouldn’t let Phil near yet because of safety concerns. Fair enough. The delay still inched by painfully in millisecond increments.

Phil felt like a green kid. Even when he had been green, he hadn’t felt this green. The excitement was crawling up his throat, and really, he should know better. Leads didn’t always pan out. The four-footed hoofed animals that left those tracks turned out to be horses, rather than zebras. And good things happened only once in a blue moon.

But damn it all, Phil felt good about this one, even if Natasha would call it wishful thinking. Even if they had to bury this beneath layers and layers of confidentiality, if this was _it_ , it wouldn’t be a mystery what happened to Captain Steven Rogers.

One of the techs said, “We’ve got some strange energy readings down here,” and Phil felt his heart beat harder.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” the tech said.

Phil thought back to everything he’d learned in the scientific summaries of Bruce Banner’s expertise. “Check for gamma radiation,” he said. “Can you pinpoint the source?”

“It’ll take another hour or two,” the tech replied.

“We pay overtime.” Phil started an email to Fury. If this was the Tesseract, he’d want to know the instant they confirmed it. If this wasn’t the Tesseract, it was still probably _something_. And something that people calling themselves Hydra shouldn’t have, at that.

Minutes ticked by. They turned into half an hour. They were creeping up to the hour mark when the site foreperson came back and said, “Agent, we can let you into the site now. There’s something you need to see.”

They bundled Phil up in even warmer clothes, with better gloves, a hard hat, and sturdy goggles. For protection against ice shards as well as the snow, he assumed. Then they got into the snowmobile and drove the short distance to where they’d found the wreck in the ice.

“It’s in bad shape, even for a wreck,” the foreperson said. “It’s a miracle there’s anything left intact in there at all.”

Phil caught the subtext. “There _is_ something intact in there.”

“Oh, yes.”

The site workers had cut a hole into the side of the wreck. The shape was barely identifiable as a plane anymore, between the force of impact and the years of pressure the ice had put on it. Phil carefully picked his way across torn metal to the place where a cluster of workers had congregated. The foreperson pushed through, Phil in his wake.

They had gathered around a large block of ice, wrapped in metal. It looked like one of the cockpit’s seats. And then Phil saw. There was a shape inside. “A body?” he asked.

“That’s what we’re thinking,” the foreperson said. “We’ve got heaters on the way. Don’t want to send it back to the family in pieces. Jim here only just missed hacking off this poor bastard’s head when he was peeling that sheet of scrap back there, to hear him tell it.”

The people with the heaters came in not long after them. After a bit of fiddling, they got them powered. The ice around the body started to drip, and then recede. Phil could barely breathe for anticipation. This was not a standard German plane, that was clear. And as the ice melted, Phil could see that whoever was frozen to that chair, he was not wearing a standard uniform.

A hand became visible, gripping the plane’s controls, and Phil frowned. He hadn’t seen many frostbite victims, but it was odd. The flesh was pale, but still a little pink. Like there was still circulation. Impossible, though. _That_ was wishful thinking.

A section of ice gave way, and Phil rushed to support the body before it could go crashing to the floor. He saw the star on the uniform as he did. This _was_ Captain America. They’d found Captain America.

Phil was still trying to process it when he realised that the body in his arms was breathing.


	14. Object Lesson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a note on this fic's compliance with canon in the endnotes - it will spoil the chapter. It also contains a few notes about Captain Marvel.

Something important was going on at SHIELD. Thor could discern that much.

The Director had been shut up in his office for the entirety of the morning. The junior agents who passed by on errands swore that they could hear shouting from inside. Yet when they checked the news, there was nothing that could obviously prompt an emergency such as Fury seemed to be managing.

Therefore, something had gone wrong on someone’s mission. It was now a matter of waiting for subsequent orders to come down.

Thor was unlikely to be included in those orders. Matters of such significance were not for him, not unless there was fighting to be done. He continued to go about his duties. He was requested in the training facilities, to assist with some of the more advanced trainees.

When he passed Barton on his way to the training floor, he saw the man was on edge. After some thought, Thor thought he might know what was wrong. He clapped the man on the shoulder and said, “I am sure Agent Romanov and Agent Coulson will return soon.”

“You haven’t known Nat that long,” he said. “When she gets in trouble, she doesn’t do it halfway.”

Thor grinned. “I can imagine. But take heart. I have rarely met someone as good as Agent Romanov in a fight.”

It was the right thing to say, for Barton smiled and said, “Rarely? Who the hell were you hanging out with before?” Not a question meant to be answered, and Thor did not. He missed Sif and the Warriors Three a great deal. If they forgave him for his actions, not just those on Jotunheim but for their impact on their king, he did not doubt they would ask Heimdall how he fared. He hoped they knew he still thought of them.

He left Barton to carry out his own duties. Director Fury would no doubt call on him soon, if the matter was one that required his skills. The humbler tasks he himself undertook were, in this case, more to his liking.

A group of five were waiting for him when he arrived at the training mats. Four students and the trainer, Agent MacFarlane, who had requested his help in the first place. All male, and two of them larger than he was. They all had a certain look of arrogance to them. Now Thor was the one who missed Agent Romanov. And Sif, again, twice over. He grinned at them all. “I hear you need my help,” he said to MacFarlane.

“Yes I do,” MacFarlane said, with a dirty look at the trainees. “They’re getting a bit too big for their britches on the training mats, if you catch my drift.”

The trainees did not look at all abashed by this criticism. Again, a feeling Thor knew from inside. He didn’t even need to know the Midgardian idiom. He smiled all the wider. “I think I can help you with that,” he said, and cracked his knuckles.

At his gesture and MacFarlane’s nod, they came at him all at once, as Thor himself might once have charged into a fight. Like he still _wanted_ to charge in, were human bodies not so fragile. Their skills did not match their opinions of themselves, Thor saw that within seconds. He ducked, and dodged, and ducked again. They did not come close to touching him, nor even to forcing him to block, their blows pathetically predictable by Thor’s standards. He’d done much the same on Jotunheim, with words rather than blows, overmatched in understanding rather than in physical might.

He’d learned better. Enough to see that he _had_ been overmatched, at least. And reckless. Far too reckless.

Now, he could pass some part of that lesson along to these men with little more than a few bruises. No one need exile them from their homes for their mistakes.

Point about their offensive capability made, Thor turned the tables.

The next blow that came towards his face, he caught, and used the leverage to throw this attacker over his shoulder and into one of his fellows. He swung back to face the third, tracking the fourth out of the corner of his eye as he circled to attack from behind. Smarter fighting, but not enough to best him. He stepped to the side, forcing them to come at him from the front or tangle themselves with their fellows still climbing to their feet. A series of quick blows, and they too were on the ground. In a real fight, Thor could have killed them. Easily.

Two of them glared up at him resentfully. The other two looked embarrassed, but more thoughtful.

“And that is why you don’t get cocky,” MacFarlane said. “Any other comments, Smith?”

“You are fortunate,” Thor said with a smile, to show there were no hard feelings on his part. “Another agent might have humiliated you further. Or, out there, they might have slain you before you knew an enemy was even there. It was well fought, save for that. Does anyone wish to try again?”

The thoughtful ones nodded, and so the training continued.

At the end, MacFarlane thanked him. “I think three of them got it,” he said. “Abrams is going to be a problem, though.”

Thor didn’t need to be told which one Abrams was. He was the one who just got angrier and angrier as the training session continued. His blows got sloppier, too. Careless. Excessively violent. “Most people can learn,” Thor said. Had he been so different? “Given time and the right motivation.”

MacFarlane watched the trainees heading off to the showers. “Not the agency’s job to be their life coaches,” he said. “If they can’t sort those issues out themselves, it could hurt us more than it hurts them.”

“I suppose that is true,” Thor agreed. If he had been less willing to learn, he could have done a great deal of damage to Earth. And to himself, of course, since he would have been killed. It would have been a short and violent exile. “Even so, some people may surprise you.”

He wondered if his friends and family would be surprised at what had become of him.

 

—

 

When Coulson called, Natasha actually stopped what she was doing and went to meet him. This sounded like the sort of thing that had to be seen to be believed.

Which was how she found herself back on an ice sheet, staring as half a dozen people argued about how to move _Captain America_ out of the wreckage without hurting him. This was Natasha’s life now. Just like she’d said to Clint months ago. The world was getting weirder, and they were going to have to cope with that. Somehow.

Coulson was going to be unbearable for _months_.

He’d excused himself to do his swooning in private, update Fury, and put in a request for various things. Equipment, mostly, but also some doctors to be flown out for consultation. Ongoing consultation, because while Captain America was alive, nobody knew if he’d wake up. And for some reason, he still appeared to be a young man. Not ninety years old at all.

It should be impossible. If she hadn’t seen it herself - and this was _after_ meeting an alien - she would have said it was impossible.

She watched for a while, then exused herself to join Coulson outside. They could talk there, cold as it was. Voices didn’t carry far when the wind was whistling like it was. Natasha waited until Coulson was done with his call, then said, “You know it’s even more important that we track down this neo-Hydra now.”

“I agree,” Coulson said. “They’ve found the Tesseract, too, a few miles back.”

“Just what we needed,” Natasha said. More things straight out of science fiction. “As far as I can tell, we’ve beaten them to it. From the interviewers back at home, this was one of their top sites for further investigation, but they ran out of resources to actually retrieve anything.” The report was that they’d blown their money trying to track down Banner to find the Tesseract for them, banking on him being less wily. And on Fury not backing Banner’s escape efforts so heavily, leaving them with something to bribe him with - coercing the Hulk being a bad long-term play. A pity for them that Fury had the same idea.

The worrying thing was that they didn’t know where the money came from in the first place. The forensic accountants were working on it, but so far they’d come up with nothing.

“Good,” Coulson said. He turned back to the wreck, still just a pile of metal on the ice, with no sign of what was inside. “I can’t believe it. This doesn’t seem like it could be real.”

From the tone of his voice, Natasha very much doubted that Phil felt the same way about the unreality of the situation that she did. He believed in heroes, and now one came back to life before his eyes. Natasha could hardly imagine what it was to have faith, let alone to have your faith rewarded. She said nothing. She didn’t know what she could say. Not about the Captain America thing.

Instead, she asked, “What are the plans for the Tesseract?”

“You’re taking it,” Coulson said, matter-of-fact. “I’ve got the decoy. Fury’s rushing a containment facility.”

“Am I going to need a lead-lined box?”

“Probably. I’ve got one on the way.”

“Is it bulky?”

“Not too bad. I know you’ve smuggled less conveniently sized objects.” He reached into his coat and pulled an object out, wrapped in a scarf.

Even through the scarf Natasha could see the blue glow. Coulson was right, it wasn’t very big, just bigger than her palm. But that light was brilliant, only growing brighter as Coulson unwrapped it.

The simplest description of the Tesseract was “glowing blue cube,” but that didn’t do it justice. That bright light had depth, reaching all the way into the centre of the object. Its edges looked sharp, and its corners weren’t even the slightest bit worn down. Time hadn’t touched it. Pressure hadn’t touched it. Cold and weather and icy seawater hadn’t touched it.

Coulson handed it to her. He said it was an energy source, yet it didn’t buzz in her hands. She stripped off a glove and touched a finger to its surface, which was smooth as glass, and cool despite Coulson keeping it inside his coat. She might as well be holding a rock. There was nothing to suggest this thing could power a lamp, except for that steady light.

It didn’t look like anything that belonged on Earth.

Natasha re-wrapped it and tucked it in her own jacket. Awkward, but not impossible. “Lead-lined box it is. I’ll think of something.” Airport security was harder to fool these days, but there were always ways to avoid it altogether. She had a few contacts who might be useful. “When does Fury want it?”

“Don’t feel the need to rush, he said. Give it a week or two. We don’t have proper scientific facilities running yet. Agent Hill will be taking charge of it for the time being.”

And then, when he got back, Coulson would take over. Fury kept one close and sent the other out to represent him. Natasha knew how he worked. She knew how Coulson worked, too. There was no chance Fury would leave this to anyone else. They’d probably get Clint to run security, which would bother him. More time away from his family. But they couldn’t let anyone else get their hands on the Tesseract, if it could do what Coulson thought it could do.

“And the neo-Hydra aspect?” she asked.

“Sitwell.”

That was that, then. In the meantime, she still had to deliver the Tesseract. Her mind spun with possibilities, while the cube felt like it was burning in her pocket.

 

—

 

“Ah, Barton. Just the man I wanted to see.”

Clint still didn’t have a good feeling about this. Nat had been reporting in for herself and Phil, but without much detail. He couldn’t help but worry. Especially now that Fury was shouting. “I could hardly avoid hearing about that, sir,” he told Fury.

He got the look that said, quite clearly, _you are not as funny as you think you are_. That was fine with Clint, though; he’d got that one plenty over the years. He knew he was exactly as funny as he thought he was. “We need to talk,” Fury said, and shut the door after Clint.

“Shoot.”

“I’ve got an assignment for you. It’s going to keep you across the country for a while.”

Clint’s heart sunk. “What’s a while?” he asked.

“Weeks. Maybe months. Security at a scientific facility. We’re moving as much as we can from the New Mexico compound.”

There was a time when Clint would have loved a nice quiet security detail to cool off from higher-key missions, even with the responsibility of _maintaining_ that security. “If you need me, I’ll take it on,” he said. He knew how to secure a building. And how to guard scientists. “What am I guarding?”

Fury pushed a file over to him. “Energy source known as the Tesseract,” he said. “I want it locked down tight. Not even an ant gets in without us knowing about it. And I _especially_ don’t want a repeat of what happened with Mister Smith.”

“I could always get Thor to test security for us again,” Clint said.

“No,” Fury said. “He goes nowhere near the Tesseract. I don’t even want him to find out about it. Same goes for Stark and Dr Foster. We’re calling in Dr Selvig for this one. Only the most reliable people. Less brilliance, more sanity. I want the names of your team on my desk in three hours.”

“Already working on it, sir,” Clint said, mind buzzing. Pity, if he _had_ had the option, he _would_ have chosen Thor. To test how the facility could be brute-forced, if nothing else. Ah well. There were other agents. People he trusted with this work.

“Building specs are here,” Fury said, pushing a plain manila folder across his desk, a Starkproofing policy in effect. “You’ll need to inspect it in person. Most of it’s going to be a construction site soon while we get facilities in order.”

Even better. These under-construction facilities were always full of holes, as security changed day to day. “Are the flights arranged?”

Fury pushed another packet of paper at him. Clint opened it and concealed just how far his stomach sank when he saw the time of departure on the manifesto. No time to go back home in person and explain to Laura. She knew it was the job, but still. He hated to do this over the phone.

After a more specific discussion on security for Selvig (couldn’t trust scientists not to wander around making trouble, completely oblivious to the risks), Clint left, heart heavy.

At least he’d get to see Nat soon, since she was delivering the Tesseract. Working with Coulson was good too. Hill was less fun, but she was an excellent boss as well.

He passed Thor as he headed to the secure area he used to make calls to his family. To his surprise, the other man was scrolling through rental listings on his computer. “Moving out, are you?” he asked.

“In time,” Thor said. “I believe I have mastered the skills necessary to pay rent. Never fear, I do not intend to go far from SHIELD.”

Clint didn’t know how he could stand it. He worked for the agency, but it didn’t own him. They didn’t say where he could live or who he could be friends with. It was prudent, secure, but Clint would have gone mad months ago. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Dr Foster agreeing to go out with you, would it?”

Thor grinned. “It might,” he said.

“Just make sure to do your research,” Clint said. “Lots of traps in renting. Take pictures of _everything_.”

“And you?” Thor asked. “You have an assignment?”

“Yeah,” Clint said. “A long one. You’re not going to see me for a few months.”

“A shame,” Thor said. “I will miss your counsel and your friendship. Are you permitted to tell me where you’re going?”

Clint shook his head. “Sorry.”

And then, only then, could he find the space and security to call Laura. Even that wasn’t as secure as he would have liked. She was upset, of course. Rare frustration bled into her voice when she said, “I’m sure it’s important.”

“It is,” he said, resting his head against a cool wall, once again feeling like the worst husband ever. “It is, I promise.” In SHIELD’s headquarters, he couldn’t even reassure her properly, or tell her that Nat and Phil were both working this case too.

“Will you be back when the baby comes?”

“I’ll do my best,” Clint said. “Fury’s not a monster. If I get a _day_ of leave, I’m coming back. Even if I only get to see you for five minutes. I promise I’ll do my best. I’ll call whenever I can.”

He gathered his things together - the bare essentials, nothing he really valued aside from his weapons - and headed to the airfield. The provisional team he’d worked up followed him like ducklings. There was already a coded message from Nat on his phone, telling him she’d be there with the goods in two weeks, give or take a day.

The bigger news was from Phil, if Clint was reading it right anyway, and he wasn’t sure he _was_. He knew Phil was a Captain America fan, but the idea that the Captain had been found alive was outlandish. Even by the standards that had to accommodate “an alien broke into our facility.” Overall, it wasn’t his problem.

The plane rose into the air, the ground receding beneath him, the sky opening in front of him. He did like flying. Even better when he was the pilot. But these long stints away from home suited him less and less.

Somewhere in the distance, he thought he might be able to see the day he retired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I did fudge things with the Tesseract. It was pretty hard on my suspension of disbelief that Howard Stark and SHIELD just had it in storage and did next to nothing with it, and up to the release of Captain Marvel I didn't consider that there was anything the Tesseract did up to the start of Avengers Assemble that couldn't be handwaved with "science!" So I planned it like you see it.
> 
> And then Captain Marvel was released.
> 
> Anyway, I hope that the additional deviation from canon isn't going to ruin the fun. Thanks for sticking with the story!


	15. Time and Space

Thus far, Tony had concluded that Doctor Foster was _very_ good at math. Not so good with IT security, but very good at math. Very good at physics too.

She also organised her computer well, which was nice. Made it easier for him to copy the files he needed, and a few he didn’t, so that if SHIELD found out she wouldn’t be on the hook for passing him information. Provided they found out through her computer rather than spying on his chat with her and her boyfriend.

Her theoretical work had some of the beauty of pure mathematics, but what Tony had was built around the practical application. She’d made one assumption that Tony thought she couldn’t back up in her work itself - that she was dealing with something man-made. Alien-made. Whatever. Tony in turn was assuming that she’d got that bit of information from Point Break. He’d got here somehow, and it might be the sort of thing he knew about.

Just looking at the curve on the one graph…

So. General theory. There was a machine of some sort out there, on an alien planet, whichever one Point Break had come from. They’d avoided the problems of faster-than-light travel by building something that could poke temporary holes in time and space, drastically reducing the distance between their planet and wherever else they wanted to travel. This machine could control where these holes opened. For that, you needed a lot of energy.

What Foster had here showed was that once these holes had been opened, there was a period of time afterwards in which you could detect the activity of the device that had opened it, like seeing light around the edges of a closed door.

Here, on this paper, were her measurements for when Point Break had arrived. She was using that as the baseline for a door opened to Earth. Again, Tony was assuming that was something she’d got from the horse’s mouth, but he really wanted to have a chat to her about what she’d asked Mr Smith. And what he’d answered. And see if he could maybe talk some science with Smith too.

And here, the bit that Point Break was worried about, were her measurements three days after he arrived. It started out exactly the same as the baseline door-opening, only much smaller scale. Then the energy output ramped up. And up and up and up. It was a _lot_ of energy. A small star’s worth, perhaps. Then it blinked out. Just like that.

No matter how he looked at it, no matter what he compared it to, he came to the same conclusion as Dr Foster. Something catastrophic had happened out there.

What he couldn’t tell yet was just what had blown up. The wormhole-making machine? Or wherever the machine had been pointed? Tony didn’t like thinking like that. He’d left his arms-dealing days behind him. But there was that much energy, and the wormhole machine could definitely double as a superweapon.

Either way, he wondered when the light from the blast would hit Earth.

Next step was finding a way to contact Point Break. A bit more hacking revealed that he was in Aspen, of all places. Tony hadn’t been for a while, but he didn’t like his chances of quietly talking to Point Break when he was literally on the job for SHIELD. Better to wait until he was back in New York. They couldn’t follow him everywhere, not in person. And if they tried it electronically, Tony had some surprises for them.

He could wait a few more days to talk to Earth’s visitor. He pretty much had to. Not like his life wasn’t full of other things. They were even good things.

They definitely had to go get some good steak, when he did manage to get Point Break away from SHIELD. How often did Tony get the opportunity to help introduce someone to Earth and all its finer things?

 

—

 

When Thor arrived back from Aspen (the prices had indeed been high), SHIELD’s headquarters were in disarray. Thor had never seen anything even approaching the commotion, not even before he’d left and Fury had been shouting at everyone to walk past. Bemused, Thor passed several agents looking as though they were suffering under the burden of paperwork.

His confusion only grew as he ventured further into the building and found that some hasty remodelling had been done. There was also a sizeable hole in one plywood wall. Thor had no idea where that could have come from. In fact, the wall itself had not been there when he departed.

“What happened?” he asked the pair of maintenance workers tasked with cleaning up. He also stepped forward to assist in the removal of a splintered bit of plywood hanging from an upper beam. Beyond the wall, he could see a strangely decorated room, all olive green and brown.

The workers looked at each other. One said, “Captain America.”

“Who?”

After a glance at each other, an expression Thor had come to know well as others realising the extent of his ignorance about Earth, one said, “One of our war heroes.”

The other said, “It’s a bit hard to explain.”

They did try, though, and so Thor heard an abbreviated tale of Steven Rogers, who had fought the evil known as Hydra and so apparently given his own life in the process, only to be discovered alive now. Thor hadn’t thought Midgardians lived so long. Apparently Captain Rogers was something known as a “super soldier,” and this explained his longevity. None of that explained why there was a hole in the wall, however.

Further inquiry revealed that Captain Rogers had been brought here, to SHIELD, and confined in the room beyond to recover. The strange decorations were meant to mimic the time he had last known, and meant to put him at his ease.

“Ah, my friends,” he said. “Whoever ordered that was most unwise.” He would rather wake up in a strange place than a strange place made to look familiar, himself. “I take it the Captain broke himself out of SHIELD confinement.”

“Right through the wall,” the taller of his conversational partners said mournfully.

Thor looked at the remains. Someone tall and strong had burst through it, without a doubt. Human as he was, it might well have given him some difficulty. Not too much, but some. He could not help but wonder what sort of man this Captain America was. Perhaps SHIELD would allow him to meet the man. He had not been turned away from this hallway.

That said, someone breaking down a wall inside SHIELD’s very headquarters was not the sort of thing easily concealed.

He logged onto his computer to start composing his post-mission reports (he was growing more adept at the language SHIELD required of him, there), and within two minutes, a little box blinked up in the corner of his screen.

_Analysis complete_ , it said.

For a second, Thor didn’t realise who the message came from. Then it clicked. Stark. Stark had finished examining Jane’s work. He hesitated over it, unsure how to reply. He did not know whether or how SHIELD could monitor how he used his computer. He assumed so, and he hoped Stark was being cautious. If he could take the information he needed from Jane’s computer without alerting SHIELD, Thor just had to hope that Stark knew how to conceal his contact with Thor now.

Even as he watched, the first message deleted itself. A second one blinked through. _Feel like walking past Stark Industries tonight? Nod or shake head._

He mentally reviewed his list of tasks for the evening, then nodded.

Once again the message deleted itself as if it had never been there, and a third appeared. _Walk around the building sometime after eight. I’ll meet you. We’ll go somewhere quiet._

Thor nodded a second time, and the third message too vanished. No further sign from Stark appeared.

Within a matter of hours, Thor might have better answers as to what had become of his home. Whether the Bifrost truly was broken, and if so, how. Confirmation of Jane’s theories, or refutation. Working under these circumstances would be difficult, but he would persist despite the gnawing need to know. He was a grown man, not a child. He could master his fear to work the day through, at least.

He just had to wait.

 

—

 

They took him to a new room. They’d brought the old bed in, plus a small table and a chair. Otherwise the apartment was empty. They told him they’d bring him briefing notes as soon as they had them printed, promised him that they would help him adjust, and left him to his own devices.

Steve didn’t know what devices those might be, under the circumstances, but he’d been left to them all the same. He felt more than a little bit lost. He felt more than a little bit sick. Two thousand and _what_? He’d been speaking to Peggy, and then nothing. Blackness.

Seventy years of it, apparently. Oh, god.

He ignored the papers for a second. He just needed to get himself grounded. This apartment - it wasn’t far off barracks, really. Until you looked at the details. The cabinets were built differently. The faucets too.

Then he looked out the window, and there was no pretending then. The lights. There were so many more cars, all of which looked very different to the cars he’d known. It was - it was something, that was what it was. He looked until he couldn’t bear to anymore and returned to take on the briefing papers. Even those were strange. They’d been typed, but not on the machines the girls used back - back where he’d come from. The paper was thin. Flimsy. The ink wasn’t pressed into the paper as deeply as hewas used to, and when the paper caught these strange, harsh lights, the ink shone oddly.

He tried to put all the differences aside enough to actually read what was written there. Seventy years. They’d found him in the ship he’d crashed in, frozen to the controls. Still alive, obviously, but they didn’t know how he’d survived. They’d attached copies of doctors’ reports, which didn’t make sense to Steve. He knew some of the words, but he hadn’t been a doctor when he’d crashed and he sure wasn’t one now.

How? _How_?

The next paper was a summary of how the mission had ended. The big picture, anyway. How many people had died, as best they could tell. The cities - he’d succeeded. He had that much. He’d succeeded and the war had ended not long afterwards. Hydra had vanished, the Russians had taken Berlin, Hitler had committed suicide. It had _ended_.

There was nothing about his friends. About Peggy. Steve flipped through the papers twice to make sure, until a neatly handwritten note on a yellow piece of paper fell out. It read _Information to be given in person_ and listed the names of all the Howling Commandos and Margaret Carter.

In person. Steve didn’t know whether that was good or bad. It could be both.

And then he had nothing to do but wait, guts tying themselves in knots. Literally nothing to do. He didn’t have so much as a pencil, and this wasn’t much more than a cell. They could at least have left him a radio. If they still used radios in the future.

He was hanging half out the window again, trying to see what else was out there, when there was a knock on the door. “Captain Rogers?”

“Come in,” he called back, nearly knocking his head on the windowframe as he drew back. All he’d learned was that this building was _tall_. How many like the Empire State Building did they have now?

The man who stepped inside, not all that much younger than Steve, looked at him with naked fascination. “Director Fury is ready to see you now,” he said. “If you’ll follow me?”

“Got nothing better to do,” Steve said. He tried not to sound too bitter. He didn’t know if he’d succeeded.

This was the wrong way to think about this. He was alive. He should be _glad_ he was alive.

What must Peggy have thought? She’d been listening when -

Stop it now, Rogers.

The man who had collected him from Times Square, in all its overwhelming, garish confusion, turned out to be Director Fury himself. That wasn’t the sort of thing that would have been allowed before he’d gone to sleep. Maybe things had changed for the better. The war was over, after all, and if the war was over who knew what else could happen?

“I have to say, Cap, I don’t think anyone’s training covered this,” Director Fury said.

“Mine definitely didn’t,” Steve said.

“It does mean that we have to work out how to help you,” the director said. “The doctors say you’re physically fine, right now. Fittest 90-year-old they’ve ever seen. But that’s just your physical health. You’re going to need to get your head on straight. I don’t know where psychiatry as a profession was at when you went into the ice, but these days we’ve gone a bit beyond shellshock treatments.”

A chill went through Steve. He got out of the ice and the first thing they wanted to do was institutionalise him? “I’ll be fine, sir,” he said.

And if the director forced him, well, Steve had got out of worse than a civilian hospital before.

“Suit yourself,” the director said. “We can put you up for a while. You’re owed it. We’ll get someone onto calculating your wages and pension so you don’t have to worry about the money.”

He was glad he didn’t have to worry about the money. He’d woken up in the future like a damned fantasy novel, and everyone he knew and loved might be dead, but at least he didn’t have to worry about the _money_. He tried to keep a straight face. “I’d be grateful for that, sir.”

“Now, I’m not going to lie to you, we’d be happier if you lived on-base for at least the next few weeks. We’ve got rooms for agents here, like the one you were just in. If you want that one, it’s yours, or we can see if we can find you one with a better view.”

A better view. They were talking about a _view_. It was just about all that Steve could stand. “Sir, with respect, I think there are more important things for us to discuss,” he said.

He barely caught how Fury’s eyes narrowed. “Just trying to ease you into it, Cap. There’s some heavy stuff here.”

As Steve had feared. “Then tell me,” he said. “I’ve heard bad news before.”

The sooner he heard it, the sooner he could do something. Maybe not about - about them all getting old without him, but maybe he could contact his friends or Peggy, if any of them were alive.

“It’s not all bad,” Fury said. “Let’s get started, then.”

 

—

 

Stark Tower was much the same at night as it was by day. Even if he hadn’t been there recently, Thor knew the way there by now. As Stark had instructed him, he started walking around the building. Such a task could be expected to take a while.

He did not fear SHIELD’s surveillance here. He only worried about Stark’s, and even then he did not know what Stark would hope to achieve.

Thor walked from the main entrance, where even at this hour people were coming and going, all the way around to the back of the building. There were people coming to and from the back entrances as well, delivering goods and performing maintenance. The third such small door he passed opened as he approached, and Stark himself stuck his head out. “Hey, Point Break. This way.”

Thor followed. “I’ve seen the movie,” he said.

“It’s a fun one, isn’t it?”

“It’s not to my taste.”

Stark stopped dead and stared at him. “You really are an alien.”

“As I told you.”

After recovering from his momentary shock - which did not seem to hamper him unduly - Stark ventured onwards. He took back hallways, frequented only by janitors, until he led them to a smaller elevator. “It’s private,” Stark explained. “I’ve got some steak ordered. ‘Cause I interrupted your date earlier. I’ll make it up to Foster some other way. She likes science, right?”

“She does indeed.”

“I’ll send her some science, then. Start a new grant or something.”

They emerged from the elevator into a room the likes of which Thor had not seen since leaving Asgard. SHIELD’s headquarters were built for function, not luxury. Stark had no such concerns. Modern Midgardian luxury here ran to glass and steel more than gold or silver, and this was what the room reflected. This level of Stark’s tower was not the highest, but still its windows stretched from floor to ceiling, allowing a view over New York such as he’d only seen from the top of the Empire State Building. The room, too, was a large one. Thor had recently learned the dollar value of space and views. This was the sort of dwelling only a very wealthy individual could afford.

And, much like his brother’s rooms back on Asgard, spare surfaces were liberally strewn with random components. Stark’s were mechanical, rather than magical. Stark whistled, and a robot pulling a dinner cart entered the room, beeping enthusiastically. It almost sounded alive.

“Great, thanks DUM-E. Just what I needed.” Stark handed Thor a platter, and grabbed at a little flash drive for himself. “Eat up. I’ll explain while you do.”

Stark was even more verbose than Jane could be, and the details of his explanations made no more sense to him than hers did. But what little Thor did understand was that Stark agreed with Jane. The data she’d collected indicated that whatever had caused readings like she’d seen was a machine, which had overloaded and blown out.

Jane was one of the cleverest people Thor had ever met. Stark, he suspected, was in the same league. They both knew of these matters, and they both told him that the Bifrost was likely broken. It was time to believe it. No matter what the implications were for his home.

If only he could do something.

Thor looked up at the Manhattan night sky. He could see no stars from here, not past the lights of the city. If he called for Heimdall, there would be no answer for an exile. There was no help he could give. None at all. It was, he reflected, an all too human feeling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, we're now officially post-Endgame. As far as I'm concerned that's the best time to ignore canon. Thanks for reading!


	16. Buried Deep

Steve was settling in. It was not easy. Everything came with reminders.

SHIELD hadn’t quite given up on providing facilities that looked like they belonged back in the forties. To his slight embarrassment, Steve did find them more comfortable than modern surroundings. He just - it was overwhelming. Everything was overwhelming. Everywhere he turned something was different. Staying inside was less daunting.

Several SHIELD agents had tried to talk to him, but Steve found it difficult to converse with them. Their lives were like nothing he knew. It was hard to connect.

Sometimes he just got so angry. It wasn’t fair. Why was he still here? He’d accepted his death. He should be dead. What was here for him now?

When moods like that overtook him, there was nothing to do but work himself to exhaustion in the gym SHIELD provided for him. In private.

There was a part of him that knew that he’d probably be better off making new friends, but Steve couldn’t face the thought. He had, or he’d had, friends. He’d liked them fine. He wanted them back. And Peggy. She was still alive. He hadn’t visited her yet. She was ill, Fury had said, and her mind was all but gone. Something called Alzheimer’s Disease. If she remembered him, Fury had warned, it wouldn’t be for long.

He couldn’t bear going to see her like that, not Peggy, so strong and smart and beautiful. Not when his last memories of her were still so clear. Steve was a coward when it counted.

Another punching bag hit the floor. His third for the day. But he still felt - felt bad, so he put a fourth up. For a few minutes there was nothing but his fists and the bag. It felt good to hit something, and focusing on the sting in his knuckles and the burn in his arms made the rest of it go away a little. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

The next day, a SHIELD agent came by and asked if he wanted to spend time in the agency’s training area and spar against real people.

“I don’t think it’d be a very good idea,” Steve said. “I mean, I could hurt someone.” He’d done that a few times before, and that was when he wasn’t so angry at the world he destroyed punching bags on a regular basis.

“SHIELD’s people are trained well,” the agent said. “We know how not to get hurt in training.”

He really should meet new people. He really should. “Thank you,” he made himself say. “Maybe tomorrow.” And maybe he even would, if he could make himself. It was by no means a sure thing.

But the day after that, he didn’t feel quite so bad. Still hazy, still numb, but not so crushingly awful. He managed to get up and dressed and to eat a breakfast that almost tasted like food. Even _that_ had changed over the years. Who would have thought? In any case, for whatever reason, he thought he could manage to go check out SHIELD’s gym. It was only downstairs.

Braced for all the strangeness of the modern world, Steve ventured downstairs like he’d said.

In some ways it was still a gym like any other. The machines were shinier. People liked windows more now than they did back in the forties, either that or they’d worked out how to put more in. It made the room look larger. At the same time, he tried to ignore the sight of the new New York beyond those windows. He didn’t recognise this place. It might as well be a totally different city.

There was plenty of activity going on around him, and Steve didn’t feel like a part of it in the slightest. Two female agents were sparring in the central ring, enthusiastically cheered on by a group of other agents. Even as Steve watched, one woman triumphed over her opponent. The winner called, “I’m fighting Thor next!”

“You want your ass kicked again?” someone shouted back to her.

“I’ll win one of these days,” she shouted back.

At least nobody was staring at him. That was something. On the few occasions he’d ventured beyond the rooms SHIELD had given for him, he’d felt like a freak. Back to the dancing monkey he’d sketched all those years ago.

There was a cheer and laughter as a man, presumably the aforementioned Thor, climbed into the ring to face the victorious female agent. Someone called out, “Careful, she’s got a taser!”

“Very funny,” Thor called back, before squaring off. The female agent was tall and muscular, for a dame, but her new opponent was far bigger. It looked like an awful mismatch. It quickly proved to be one, too. If anything, Steve thought the big guy was going easy on her, so she could learn from it.

It was pretty shocking, to see men and women sparring together like that, yet Steve couldn’t say that the female agent seemed disturbed at all. Everyone even looked like they were having fun. It was far removed from Steve’s workouts in his solitary, shadowed gym, punching down bag after bag and feeling sorry for himself.

The victor of the second match, Thor, looked around from his vantage point in the ring, and his gaze landed on Steve. “You! You, my friend, I have not seen you here before. Would you care to step into the ring with me for a match?”

 _Then_ they started staring. “That’s Captain America,” one agent said. “Do _you_ want your ass kicked?”

Thor adopted a mock-outraged expression, though his eyes did not leave Steve. “Are you disrespecting my cultural traditions?” he asked.

“Your cultural traditions of getting your ass kicked?”

“One of our finest,” Thor said. “How else would you ever get to know someone? Come, a friendly match!”

It was a little embarrassing, but Steve wasn’t the best-trained in hand-to-hand combat. There hadn’t been time for him to learn much. Most of the times he’d fought, after the treatment, he’d won because he was stronger, faster, and/or smarter than the other guy. Every time he’d fought before that, he’d lost. Hand-to-hand wasn’t his favourite activity in the world.

This guy didn’t smile like a bully, though. Steve could probably do this. He had to do _something_. That was why he was down here in the first place. “All right,” he said, and climbed into the ring himself.

His opponent smiled wider. Not _quite_ like a bully, Steve thought, but definitely like someone who enjoyed a fight. Steve had a few bad memories of smiles like that. Not so many as he did of bullies, of course. But he couldn’t hold it against the man, who hadn’t done anything to him yet.

Then, without further ado, Steve had to sidestep a punch. The big guy was faster than he looked. Skilled, too. Steve was hard pressed to keep dodging, relying on his speed more than anything else. When Steve blocked, he _felt_ it. This guy was good.

Since he didn’t have the expertise his opponent clearly had, he’d just have to see if he could catch up as he went.

 

—

 

Thor had to admit, he was impressed. He still didn’t know who this Captain America was, exactly, but he was both fast and resilient. It was like fighting an Asgardian. If the man was more skilled, undoubtedly Thor would already have been defeated. As it were, he could see his opponent sizing him up and copying his own moves as they fought.

A challenge worthy of Agent Romanov, if in a very different way. If Thor wished to win, he had to finish this quickly. He was not used to being in a position of such weakness. Aggression was the key here, and that was all the more challenging with an opponent of such strength. He renewed his attacks, searching for holes in his opponent’s defense. Strong as the man was, he would not be easily overwhelmed. Nothing Thor could do but try!

He tried.

Unfortunately, his opponent was not only strong, but clever. He took advantage of his superior strength and stamina, and blocked Thor’s blows, waiting for him to tire himself out. Thor moved to tactics that worked against Volstagg, another who relied on his hardiness for victory. He still had to be fast, though, for he was tiring. He launched into a flurry of blows, quick but for the most part predictable, and did his best to establish a pattern, trying to lure his opponent into a predictable set of strikes and counters in return. By the time his opponent had succumbed, Thor went for the unexpected move, only to be hastily blocked by sheer speed.

He might be able to kill this man, Thor thought, but as he was, he had very little chanceof defeating him in a friendly sparring match. This was not as it was with Natasha Romanov. Thor was, quite simply, _outmatched_.

He put his hands up and said, “Well fought, my friend.” The victor was clear, and there was no need for either of them to beat themselves into the ground.

His opponent retreated too, with a look of surprise as the onlookers cheered again before dispersing to attend to their own training, the show concluded. “Um, thanks,” he said. And though his punches were fearsome, his voice was soft. Almost uncertain. He didn’t seem happy at all.

That was a true shame, because Thor had enjoyed the fight very much. How long had it been since he’d faced someone stronger and faster than he on the field of battle? Probably far too long. “I am Thor,” he said. “May I ask your name, my friend?”

“Oh! Steve Rogers. Nice to meet you.” The handshake that accompanied the introduction was strong as Thor had expected. He hadn’t known humans could be so strong.

“And you. That was a good fight.” Though, looking at Rogers, he still seemed distracted. “I apologise if you did not find it so entertaining,” Thor added.

“I just don’t fight for fun that much,” Rogers said.

“Then you are missing out!” Earth was strange like that. Fighting was serious, for them. Possibly because humans were, usually, very fragile. The other alternative was that Rogers had been fighting with the wrong people. “It may be presumptuous of me, but with my regular sparring partner away, I would relish the chance to fight with you again. Even when she returns -”

“- she?”

“Yes, Agent Romanov is very skilled, and even when she returns I would appreciate the opportunity to spar again.” He smiled as charmingly as he could manage.

Rogers hesitated. “All right,” he said at last.

“Excellent! I shall hold you to it.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t speak like you’re from around here.”

“I am not,” Thor said, as cheerfully as he could manage. It was difficult. Stark’s conclusions were still very much on his mind. _Something went supernova up there._ Then Stark had been unable to determine what, exactly, had gone supernova. It could be Asgard itself, for all he knew, and him still trapped here. His mother, his brother, his friends, they might all be dead, yet what was he to do about it? He was trapped here. Trapped utterly. “And you must be a recent arrival here yourself.”

Rogers didn’t smile as he said, “I guess you could say that.” He looked out one of the windows and added, “I used to live here a long time ago. It’s changed.”

Thor laughed at that. “Every time I turn around it seems the stores have changed. That and the fashions. If I didn’t know better I would say that it was magic.”

Rogers’ face shut down at the words. Thor had said something wrong. He thought about his words - oh, how Loki would laugh at him - and thought he might see the problem. “I assure you I share at least some of your bewilderment,” he said. “I did not mean to sound as though I were making light of your troubles.”

“No, it’s okay,” Rogers said, though it did not at all look as though Rogers were okay. “You’re right. New York changes.”

“For all its confusion I have found it to be a remarkable place,” Thor offered, ignoring the stab of pain over his own lost home.

Rogers squared his shoulders as though he were squaring up for battle. “Best city in the world,” he said firmly.

 

—

 

Fury would call this a work in progress, Natasha thought, surveying the havoc. She, personally, disagreed.

The thing about laboratories, apparently, was that they couldn’t be built just anywhere. She’d heard Stark complaining about it a few times when she’d been posing as Natalie Rushman. All sorts of things could interfere with scientific tools, and a lot of those things could be found in cities. SHIELD had its own facilities, but nothing quite enough. Not for this. In practice, this meant that SHIELD had kicked a bunch of innocent university researchers out of their own facilities, ruining a good deal of their own research and probably no few careers, while they got their own lab extension sorted. That would take months. Fury was going to be paying through the nose for this.

And all for the object Natasha had in her backpack.

This last stretch of smuggling had been the easiest. She’d posed as a student and nobody had looked twice. Not at her, and not at what she was carrying. She’d decorated the box as best she could and planned to pass it off as a sculpture if pressed, but nobody had pressed. She doubted that that would remain true as she drew closer to the lab itself. Clint wouldn’t let anyone wander in unchallenged.

A change of tactics was called for. The most secure drop-off was a drop-off only she and the receivers of the object knew about. She started texting Clint. _Where’s the best place for me to get in?_

It was only two minutes before he texted back. _Scaffolding near the shaft at the northeastern corner of the site. I’ll keep the cameras down for you. Give me ten minutes._

At a construction site like this it would be child’s play to put a board in front of a camera, or short one out temporarily. Natasha took out a book. Nothing to see here. Just a woman waiting for the next class. Nothing remarkable. After eleven minutes and thirty seconds, Clint texted back. _You can go._

Moving carefully, Natasha headed towards the shaft Clint had identified as the best way to sneak down. She hadn’t dropped the Tesseract yet and wasn’t planning to start now. What if it got damaged? What if it _exploded_? Neither bore much thinking about.

This was more of the strangeness she wasn’t sure she wanted anything to do with. It wasn’t like smuggling information. The Tesseract, as far as she could tell, was an object of obsession. Like a nuclear warhead made art. People would do strange and desperate things forits power. Things that Natasha wasn’t sure she would be able to understand, if she saw them in action.

Another thought that wasn’t going to do her any good right now. Natasha put it aside too.

The climb itself wasn’t too bad. It could be worse. She’d tell Clint how to make it worse once she got down there. Hopefully construction itself would solve the issue soon. She slipped down, past a deactivated camera, and into a dusty hallway. It was hard to hear anything over the sounds of building nearby.

Clint was waiting for her at the next intersection. “I see you got here okay,” he said. “How’d you get on with airline security?”

“Called in some favours,” Natasha said. She’d avoided the strictest checks entirely.

“Can I see it?”

Natasha took it out of her backpack. Clint raised an eyebrow at the swirls of shiny foil she’d pressed on the box, and raised his eyebrows further when she cracked the box open to reveal the glowing blue inside. He looked at it for a long moment. “That’s…really sinister-looking, actually,” he said.

“Just the same as they pulled it up from the ocean floor,” Natasha said.

Like her, he understood what it meant that the Tesseract was so pristine after seventy years under cold salt water, battered around by currents. “What does it do?”

“Everything and anything,” Natasha said. “At least that’s the impression I’ve got.”

Clint whistled and shut the box again. “No wonder Fury’s not keen on letting the brilliant people near this.”

Natasha imagined Stark with the Tesseract. That…could go poorly. That could go very poorly indeed. “Who’s dealing with this? Anyone I know?”

“Selvig,” Clint said. “So no. You coming to drop this off with the scientists, or making a break for it?”

She looked back up the shaft she’d climbed down. “Going,” she said. It would be far, far better if nobody ever knew she’d dropped the Tesseract off at all. “You enjoy the guard duty.”

Clint’s sigh of frustration was hard to miss. “If you find yourself upstate,” he said.

Natasha turned and nodded. She could look in on his family for him. It wasn’t just about Clint knowing they were well, or he’d call them himself, it was about knowing that he hadn’t left them alone. Natasha had never had family. Clint was the closest. This was a thing she could do for family.

“Say hi to Thor for me too, if you see him,” Clint added, as Natasha started the journey back up. “Make sure he doesn’t get gouged by any landlords.”

She didn’t like this. Fury was burying this thing, the Tesseract, deep as he could, but there were too many loose ends. Too many interconnections, too many lies between people who knew each other. There was nothing she could point to and say _this is wrong_ , but as a whole…

And that was just for the people on Earth.

Coulson talked about the other shoe, sometimes. She had to admit, this felt a lot like the other shoe. As she was all too aware of now, humans weren’t alone out there. Somewhere, any number of people could want this Tesseract, and if they wanted it, Natasha didn’t know if Fury could ever bury it deep enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, and for any and all comments/kudos/bookmarks!


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